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BODY WORK
by Sara Paretsky
Putnam, August 2010
464 pages
$26.95
ISBN: 0399156747


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

VI Warshawski has a new man in her life, a musician named Jake, so you might say it's his fault that she is drawn into the murky events centred on an avant-garde nightclub in Chicago's west side, the snarkily-named Club Gouge. He and VI, along with Warshawski's inner circle, are there for the music but stay for the performance art, which consists of an all but naked woman covered in heavy body makeup who invites the audience to paint pictures on her flesh. On this night, most produce amateurish daubs, but two are different - a heavy-set man who inscribes her backside with a series of numbers and letters, and an intense young woman who paints a stylized design surrounding a woman's face. It is this that prompts a drunken Iraq veteran in the audience to make a run at the stage, claiming that he is being personally attacked.

Some weeks later, VI is in the club again, this time to keep an eye on her annoying cousin Petra, who has taken a job waitressing in the place. She has just left the club when shots ring out from the alley, where she finds the young woman, Nadia Guaman, the one who outraged the veteran with her designs, bleeding to death. The vet, Chad, is swiftly arrested, even though he is in a coma as the result of what appears to be a botched suicide attempt and VI is retained by his parents to find evidence of his innocence. And that's only the beginning. Before she's done, VI will have got to the heart of a complicated plot that will draw together threads that begin in Iraq and in Chicago's own shady past.

It is very close to thirty years since VI Warshawski made her first appearance on the mean Chicago streets in INDEMNITY ONLY, a book that Val McDermid claims changed her life. Over the years VI has become sadder, wiser and sorer, but she has never lost her determination to try to make some small part of the world less threatening for those who feel their voices are unheard. In this case, it is a Mexican-American family being bullied by a large corporation, and a comatose veteran of the second Iraq war, written off as one more trigger-happy sufferer of PTSD. But along the way, VI observes the ordinary injustices of our time - that it costs, for example, $28,000 for a brief stay in the emergency room of a private hospital and associated tests. Or that the South Side of Chicago has been transformed into a no-go area as old manufacturing jobs have left the country, leaving behind a population who may never find work. Or that in this era of "post-feminism," women's bodies still remain an area of contention and vulnerability. Or that, forty or more years after Stonewall, coming out as a lesbian may remain for some women a difficult undertaking.

Yet as heavily laden as this book is, the reader feels neither burdened nor sermonized, largely because VI is quick to recognize her own limitations, both moral and physical, and partly because even her most loyal friends are not reluctant to point them out to her when necessary. Crusaders do not commonly feel the self-doubt that VI expresses in an email to Jake: "Sometimes I think the fact that I'm so willing to act is a danger to the world around me....I think I'm driven more by despair, even, than confidence, especially the despair of seeing so much misery around me. And then I leap into action and make it worse."

Paretsky has been at it a long time and is still very much at the top of her game. VI may think fondly of retiring to the country with her dogs, who, unlike their owner, never age and Mr Contreras and Dr Lotty, who are similarly immune to time. But I expect that, even if her van were packed and headed toward Wisconsin, some flagrant injustice would catch her eye and keep her in Chicago until it was dealt with. At least, I certainly hope so.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, September 2010

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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