One of My Favorite Authors

My job requires a lot of travel.  On a typical day I'll put a couple a hundred miles on my vehicle.  For the first 30 minutes or so I'll pray until I get to my first stop.  For the next four hours (give or take) I'll listen to podcasts that I have on rotation.  I also have a library card and use their Libby app to listen to audiobooks.  I read a lot of different books by different authors and different genres.

One of the authors that I really enjoy is James Lee Burke.  He writes fiction crime novels, and if asked to describe his work, I call him the "Cajun John Grisham."  That might describe the type of writing, but I think James Lee Burke's writing is better.  It is lyrical, almost, and so descriptive.  If you close your eyes, while listening to the words read by Will Patton, he puts you right on the banks of Bayou Teche where you can hear the frogs croaking and smell the fish spawning.

I especially enjoy his "Dave Robicheaux" series which describe the exploits of Dave Robicheaux, the protagonist, and his sidekick and best friend, Clete Purcell.  JLB's stories weave throughout Acadiana in South Louisiana and into New Orleans.  Many of the towns, sights, sounds and smells are very familiar to me and the characters are real and endearing.  

"By now you've probably gotten the feel of South Louisiana. It's a beautiful place, but it's also a place of endings, or change that's hard to witness.  Many have a love affair with it, the way Dave Robicheaux loves it and almost destroys himself trying to save a lost cause.  Then there are those who have no conscience and abuse its swamps and rivers and marshlands as though they were a trash dump, and that's no exaggeration.  Sometimes when I'm fishing way down on the Gulf at sunset, I'll see an old storage tank rusting into the water, or bamboo flooded with an iridescent reflection that shouldn't be there, or a man-made canal streaming saline into a freshwater forest of gum trees and cypress and tupelos.  It makes me sad.  It makes me feel that I am watching the end of something, maybe even time itself."

- James Lee Burke from "Clete"

On my daily drives, as I'm listening to a James Lee Burke novel and looking out at the landscape around me that perfectly matches the setting of his novels, it's as if I'm right there in the book with Dave and Clete.  His prose is beautiful.  J. D. Salinger, in "The Catcher in the Rye," wrote that "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."  

A photo I took last week on LA 14 between Hayes and Lake Arthur, LA

James Lee Burke attended SLI which later became USL (University of Southwestern Louisiana) in Lafayette, LA.  He has a home in New Iberia and thus, is deeply familiar with its people, its culture and its problems.  He speaks of them with brutal honesty, so much so that you go back and read the words again, as they've touched a nerve of familiarity within you.  You immediately understand deeply what he's trying to convey.  They're thoughts you've had, but never verbalized.  There's a certain sadness that you can't explain while reading some of his work.

Sometimes it is hard to explain to outsiders the culture of southern Louisiana and the quandary of many of its people.  The world in which they grew up in is a decaying memory, but many of them have no place in the present.  I know Cajuns that have never been farther than two parishes from their birthplace.  There are people here who cannot add and subtract, cannot read a newspaper, and do not know what the term 9/11 means.  Over 40% of children are born to an unwed mother.  In terms of heart and kidney disease, infant mortality, fatal highway accidents and contaminated drinking water, we are ranked among the worst in the nation.  Our politicians are an embarrassment that give avarice and mendacity a bad name.  

So how do you get angry with someone who was born poor, speaks English so badly that she's unintelligible to outsiders, has the worldview and religious beliefs of a medieval peasant, cleans houses for a living, if she's lucky and is obese because of the fat-laced bulk food she feels thankful for.  

The temperature had hit 98 degrees at four in the afternoon.  The humidity was eye-watering and as bright as spun glass as tangible as lines of insects crawling on your torso and thighs.  At sunset lightning pulsed in the clouds over the gulf but no rain fell.  And the wind was dry and hot and smelled of road tar and diesel fuel.  I walked down to the bayou and watched the sun shrink into an ember between two black clouds and disappear.  And then the wind died and the trees stood still and the surface of the bayou quivered in the sun's afterglow as though a molecular change were taken place in the water. 

- James Lee Burke from "Robicheaux"

Looking out over the bridge in the Lacassine National Wildlife Refuge on LA Hwy 14 last week

As I look out at Spanish moss draped cypress trees, I half expect to see Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell pull onto Hwy 26 from a shell road in Clete's convertible red Cadillac El Dorado.  They'll likely have fishing poles hanging out of the car with bobbers fluttering in the breeze.  They'll wave me down and offer me a ham and onion sandwich from a grease-stained brown paper bag.

A bayou scene off of LA 14 near Lake Arthur, LA

If you haven't read any of his work, I encourage you to check out James Lee Burke, specifically his Dave Robicheaux novels.  He'll seem like an old friend.  You'll be sorry when the series ends.