Disposable Lit Reviews

Dell, 1994
466 pp.
ISBN 0-440-22146-3

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For over a decade after I bought it, the paperback copy of All Our Yesterdays sat on my bookshelf unread. I enjoy all of Parker’s Spenser novels, even the declining ones of the last couple of decades which have simply become retreads of his earlier work, and though some of his other novels don’t give me the same thrill, they’re still compelling reads. But a 466-page book described in a quote on the back as “a sprawling portrait of three generations” put me off. As a rule, I don’t like sprawling multi-generational sagas. But I finally persuaded myself that, whatever the novel’s assumed faults, Parker would never turn out the turgid, overly-detailed and underly-interesting encyclopedic soap-opera blather that normally characterizes novels of that sort. (Oh — apologies if you like those multi-generational things. No offense.)

It turns out that this is probably the best novel Parker wrote in the last twenty years. It’s certainly more challenging and ambitious than anything he’s done with the Spenser series, with any of his other private eye characters, or with his novels like Appaloosa, which largely takes the common Parker concerns of male honor and female need and transplants them intact to the Old West.

The framing device which allows at least the ghostly impression of a single protagonist exists in the present day ( i.e., 1994), with the first-person narrator Chris explaining his family history to a woman with whom he has an obviously complicated history. In between those first-person chapters (labeled “Voice-Over”) area the third-person narrative sections which examine the lives of Chris’s progenitors — his grandfather Conn, an Irishman who left Ireland during “the Troubles” after being betrayed to the British by his lover and ended up in Boston as a cop, and his son Gus who followed in his father’s footsteps, both professionally and in his bad decisions in marriage.

One feature this novel does have in common with the historical multigenerational bricks which I normally avoid is that the plot is meandering and lazy, but that’s to be expected from Parker’s make-it-up-as-he-writes storylines which are more concerned with exhibiting all sides of a character than with structuring a tight plot. In Parker’s hands, though, what often turns out as overly dense in other novels becomes light and flaky (memo to self: replace that metaphor before posting!), as the narrative characteristically focuses on the details of the present. Parker is not given to creating characters who spend page after page in internal monologues.

The main difference between this novel and the standard Parker novel is, naturally, the absence of a central series character (or cast characters) who remains essentially static through the story, a pillar of constancy while other lives crumble all around. This is the story of the lives that crumble.

Of course, being a Robert B. Parker novel, there are some familiar themes and tropes on display: honor, duty, passion, obsession, alpha male status, pop psychology, and sex. Oh, plenty of sex. Some utilitarian, some life-changing, some creepy. Nothing ties people together in a Parker novel like who’s sleeping with whom, or who wants to, or who shouldn’t have. Unless it’s who commits violence against whom; there’s plenty of that here, too.

But there are also moments of quietus and, as with the best of Parker’s work, surprisingly deep insights into character and motivation. A single scene stands out, one which contains neither sex nor violence, in which fourteen-year-old Chris realizes that his father is never going to have what he wants in his life,and instead is living so that Chris will have a chance at happiness. It’s a simple, heartbreaking moment, amid the literal and metaphoric violence.

If the only thing which has drawn you to Parker’s other novels is the wisecrackery, avoid this one; there’s no one in this novel with Spenser’s wit and disregard for authority. But if you’ve only been reading Parker for the last decade or so and you’ve seen only glimpses of depth and skill in what has become largely rote exercises in forgettable fiction, you owe it to yourself to see what the man can do when he isn’t on autopilot.