A New New Orleans Novel

Ten years after the publication of his highly acclaimed debut novel Yellow Jack, Josh Russell returns to the scene with My Bright Midnight, perhaps not a novel at all. Coming in at 138 pages and easily devoured in one sitting, this could be a novella, or perhaps just a marvelous story. The blistering pace of the narrative (we travel thirty-four years in the first fifteen pages) and the fiercely economical character descriptions give this new book the feeling of a short piece, as if you don't want to put it down lest you muck up the total effect of it all. However, the enormous backdrop the action is set against (World War II, FDR's death, Hitler's suicide) gives it the scope of a novel three times its size.

Told by a German immigrant named Walter Schmidt, My Bright Midnight inhabits the streets of New Orleans from 1928-1945, about one hundred years after Russell's first novel did. As readers, we can only hope he continues this pattern. Russell has a way of describing this oft-rendered city in a manner that eschews cliché. Part of this has to do with the authentic envisioning of New Orleans through the eyes of a foreigner (one of the great triumphs of this book), but most of it has to do with Russell's intimate knowledge of the city and its people. Much like the missing Mardi Gras parades during war time in New Orleans, also absent are the tired images of drunken beignet-chomping racists that end every sentence with "cher." Instead, we see the city anew, through Walter Schmidt's eyes, a place where, "In the pure light the live oaks glowed like neon signs in the shapes of trees."

And this strange confusion of naming the world (trees like lights/nature like electricity) seems to be the unifying theme of the book. Walter is a man driven from Germany by his own personal failures. His exile is a self-imposed one, and the unexpected way he comes to love America upon his arrival keeps him at arm's length from ever "truly" understanding what or who he is. If he is indeed German, then why does he find himself rooting for the Allies? If he is American, then why the constant sense that he is being watched, tracked, and belittled? More than this, why is it that the few people that Walter believes he loves come to hurt him the most? Why does the word "friend" seemed soaked in irony throughout the book? Why the word "family" so complicated and bizarre?

The truth, it turns out, is that Russell's vision of this world is steeped in doubles, making it difficult for the main character to know what to trust, what to believe in. After arriving in America, Walter befriends a man and a woman, Sammy and Nadine, who become the driving figures of the book. One a con man and the other an adultress, their personalities oscillate back and forth so wildly from hypocritical to sweet-hearted to vulgar to sensual that it becomes difficult even for the reader to know what to root for. Our only choice is to support whatever Walter decides, yet he is also two men in one. His own dark past and the injustice he committed against his cousin in Germany render him guilty throughout his American years, where he is constantly searching for a way to appease his conscience. It is not surprising then, when he chooses violence as a way to make peace. After all, this book proves skillfully that every side has its opposite, like karma, like friendship, and like love.

And like most books worth their paper, love is what this book ultimately tries to honor. It is about a man's love for America, for New Orleans, for a woman. It is about loving something even when it hurts you, like Germany, like a friend, like a wife. Although much of the book is terse with betrayal and mistrust...