Sins of a brother
A thriller reckons with racial tension in 1970s’ San Francisco — and a new book of poetry finds grace in the abyss
What do we really know about our parents’ past?
For the young San Francisco Civil Rights lawyer Cody Blaze, reading the memoir his journalist father leaves him after his untimely death in a suspicious car accident, the answer is: very little.
Author Robinson combines in this maze of a thriller an absorbing narrative about the 1970s’ counterculture scene in San Francisco with creeping tenets of white supremacy in the American Midwest — a collision ripe for violence.
Russell Blaze’s memoir to his son acts as the frame of this intricate narrative, controlling the suspense as the story moves along chronologically, from his traumatic adolescence in the late 1960s to his burgeoning career as a provocative journalist for Lumina magazine in Berkeley. Is the memoir a kind of suicide note, Cody wonders, or does it rather give clues to why someone was set on seeing his father dead?
“I assume my death will appear to be an accident,” Russ intimates in the letter left on his desk in his longtime Berkeley home. “By the time you reach the end, my paranoia should be explicable.”
The memoir begins with the formative event of young Russ’ life: the death by lung cancer of his cherished father when the boy is 12. From then on, as his mother struggles to make ends meet for him and his two younger siblings, Leo and Jennie, the time bomb starts to tick. Russ’ desperate mother marries a handsome actor, who degenerates into drunkenness and abuse. The beatings ratchet up, and the two brothers, in their mid-teens and simmering with resentment, seem to agree on a course of action with Russ’ glowering comment to Leo: “Someone should kill that mother—-.”
It is Leo who does it, systematically, unapologetically, propelling him down a dark trajectory from juvenile prison to hatred and violence.
Meanwhile, while Russ’ family is breaking apart, the nation is roiled in anti-Vietnam War protests, Civil Rights marches and assassinations. Thurgood Marshall is sworn in as the first Black justice of the Supreme Court. And at Russ’ high school in Sherman Oaks, California, he befriends one of the few Black students, James Cordell, who is a brilliant writer. James’ father is a Civil Rights lawyer, determined to desegregate the white neighborhood where they live. The two teens become inseparable, embarking later on the sensationally successful Lumina magazine, which faces down controversial themes such as the ugly aspects of the hippie culture and racist fringe groups then popping up around the country. The two friends become brothers.
Russ is an idealistic person who believes fervently in racial equality and justice. Estranged from his own troubled family, he embraces the Black family of his best friend and even chooses a Black woman as his first wife. Tragically, the sin of his brother — or is it his own fault for uttering those fatal words to Leo? — will return to haunt him and his family.
Accomplished novelist Robinson, a former lawyer living in Santa Fe and author of numerous legal thrillers (featuring the Honolulu lawyer Pacino McMartin), suspense novels and adventure travel stories (“Conga Line on the Amazon”), delves deeply into this transformative time in America. The reader finds their way by tracing the ever-widening circles of a delirium spiral.
ABYSS AND BRIDGE: POEMS
Three: A Taos Press
(2021, 85 pp.)
The words “abyss” and “bridge” together in the title conjure the magnificent Río Grande Gorge Bridge, of course, underscored by artist Arthur Okamura’s stunning watercolor “Moon over Annie’s Canyon” on the cover of this new collection. But author GregoRío (“Snow Falling on Snow,” “Pa’ Siempre: Cuba Poems”) ranges far and wide in these 38 poems of considerable heft, from Greece to Sicily to India to Thailand and back home to El Rito, and “abyss” becomes the wild unknown everywhere that thrills and calls to the poet.
In “Archway to Elsewhere,” she explains elliptically:
Sometimes an alleyway calls to you/
A particular archway knows your name/
Streets beg you to walk them/ Streets capable of picking and
prodding/
At what you think you know. … I want home to exist wherever I am —/
In retreat and in fullness.
This is a commanding voice, a woman in full knowledge of her power, like the “she” of “The Snake Goddess”: “Unafraid she knows what it means/ to grapple in darkness,/ … woman of regenerative strength/lover of the underworld.”
As she wanders, the poet observes: the determined process of the curandera in a hushed church in San Cristóbal (“Sanctuary”); the dirty beggar girl in “Agra Station” who pulls on the poet’s wedding ring, and they laugh together, “the lives we arrived from no longer present—/and in that moment, I saw her shining.”
Solid, fearless, these poems are chiseled from the boulders of selfknowledge: “Sometimes it is necessary to travel a long way from all you know to reveal what you know” (“Far into Nothing”).