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It's been five years since VI Warshawski's last case, and for her fans, of which I am one, it has been a long wait. As in FIRE SALE, VI here makes a return to her early life on Chicago's South Side, but this time, she goes even further back to her early childhood, some forty years ago, when racial tensions gripped Chicago and Dr Martin Luther King was for many a figure of menace, not the name of a holiday. Just back from her first vacation in years, VI stops to chat with a homeless man she knows outside her office. When he suddenly collapses, VI sees him to the hospital. As if in proof of the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished, she is approached by a hospital chaplain who, impressed with VI's good heart, talks her into trying to uncover what happened to a young black man who vanished forty years earlier as a favour to his elderly mother and aunt. Against her better judgement, and despite the fact that she really needs to make some money to pay off her credit card bills, VI sets to work. She is almost immediately thrown back forty years, to a time when racial tension was high in Chicago, and to a time when her beloved late father was a cop. To further complicate things, her young cousin Petra, daughter of her father's baby brother Peter, blows into her life like a gale-force wind, charming everyone she meets with her verve and enthusiasm. She makes VI feel old, frumpy, and grumpy by comparison. Even Mr Contreras seems smitten, murmuring that if VI were only more like Petra.... As might be expected, Warshawski's investigation into so cold a case moves with glacial slowness and it is only rather late in the book that the action builds. What long-time followers of her career will notice along the way is that the tough cookie of the earlier novels seems to be undergoing a crisis of self-confidence. Whereas in earlier times, she would shrug off criticism, now she takes it on board and to heart. She seems almost fragile, both physically and psychologically, and sinks to the floor, overcome with emotion, rather more often than we might expect. Once in action, happily, she remains her old resourceful self, but there is a new vulnerability about her that makes us worry. Paretsky's last published fiction was BLEEDING KANSAS, not one of the Warshawski series. It was in part an historical novel and a look back at the area where the author grew up. In some ways, HARDBALL is a looking-back as well, back to the formative summer that Paretsky spent in Chicago as part of a social action church group working among the city's poor. It was a summer that changed her life, she tells us in the foreword, a time both frightening and exhilarating by turns. And this too is in a sense, though not a literal one, an historical novel, What HARDBALL reminds us is that history may be past but not dead, that the wounds inflicted in hard, hard times, may close over, but leave scar tissue that never disappears. America may imagine itself to be in a post-racial period, but what happened forty or more years ago has not been exorcised. Perhaps it is this difficult knowledge that accounts for VI's loss of certainty. She may be less confident than once she was, but she hardly lacks the courage to venture into those areas and take on those demons that many would much rather ignore. And, thankfully, she retains her commitment to social justice - she is absolutely sure about that.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, September 2009
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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