How the hula girl sings : a novel /

Ex-con Luce Lemay, haunted by the crime he committed, returns to his hometown in rural Illinois to serve out his parole. Working as a gas station attendant with a fellow former inmate, he starts to forge a new life as he begins to court the tart-tongued waitress at the local diner. The locals, however, are reluctant to let him move on, and Lemay soon finds himself fending off attacks from jealous husbands, jilted fiances, and a particularly vengeful ex-con. As Lemay struggles to find redemption through his interactions with his grief-stricken landlady and a young abused boy, he finds himself inexorably drawn into the world of violence he sought to escape. Indeed, the characters seem to spend the majority of their time spitting out bloody teeth or attacking each other with tire irons. Yet Meno's poetic and visceral style perfectly captures the seedy locale, and he finds the sadness behind violence and the anger behind revenge. Fans of hard-boiled pulp fiction will particularly enjoy this novel. --Brendan Dowling

Luce Lemay returns to his hometown in Illinois after serving time for accidentally running down a young mother's infant daughter, but hope turns to tragedy in Meno's (Tender as Hellfire) moving second novel. Lemay is a poetic ex-con who often waxes lyrical about his remorse for his crime as well as the tragic character flaws of his equally romantic best friend from the joint, a troubled giant named Junior Breen. Lemay is also a hard worker who wants to make good, though, and events take a positive turn when he gets a job at a local gas station and meets beautiful young Charlene Dulaire, a waitress at a diner. Their romance sours when Dulaire's ex-fianc?, a brute named Earl Peet, attacks Lemay and threatens to run him out of town. Meno pens some wonderful scenes of courtship and setbacks in the course of love, and he also does some nice work bringing Breen to life and exploring his friendship with Lemay. The tragic confrontation between convicts and townies is somewhat predictable, but Meno gets considerable mileage from the give and take among Lemay's elderly boss and the two young ex-cons as they care for one another and try to overcome their earlier mistakes. Meno has a poet's feel for small-town details, life in the joint and the trials an ex-con faces, and he's a natural storyteller with a talent for characterization. The novel has some mawkish moments and certainly many disturbing ones, but overall it's a likable winner that should bolster Meno's reputation. National advertising; Midwest author appearances. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

An ex-con can't seem to catch a break in his old hometown. After robbing a liquor store one ugly night, Luce Lemay drives drunk and loses control of his car, killing a child in a baby carriage. A couple years later, at the start of the story, he's released from an Illinois prison and catches a bus for La Harpie, the small downstate town where he was born and raised. Luce isn't happy about going back-his crime wasn't the kind that people tend to forget-and La Harpie itself holds no promise: "A place of a kind of quiet villainy and secret lust." But there's a job there, at a gas station where Juinor, a friend from prison, has put in a good word for him. Luce has barely gotten back into town when he runs into Charlene, the younger sister of a girl he dated in high school (and who's now in a mental institution, possibly due to Luce). They each carry a doomed torch for one another, but Charlene's ex-fiance isn't having any of it. Luce struggles through the days, living in the same rooming house with Junior, an odd, older man-child who turns the gas-station signage into abstract poetry and carries a miasma of fate and death about him. Second-novelist Meno (Tender as Hellfire, 1999), a Columbia University writing professor, coats this world with Luce's fatalistic worldview (he's apparently incapable of seeing beyond the moment, or imagining any good in the world). For such grim subject matter, the author moves the story along at a surprisingly fast and easy pace, never succumbing to the overkill that American gothic tales are often prone to, seeming to take his inspiration equally from the stories of Jim Thompson and the lyrics of Nick Cave. The evil eyes of small-town America seem to peer from every page of Meno's claustrophic noir, where the good and the bad are forced down the same violent paths.