Tempest in a Hot Spot

THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN

By James Lee Burke

Simon & Schuster. 373 pp. $26

At the start of James Lee Burke's new novel, Detective Dave Robicheaux describes one of his still-recurring nightmares of combat in Vietnam, and adds his hope that "I will never again have to witness the wide-scale suffering of innocent civilians, nor the betrayal and abandonment of our countrymen when they need us most." Then he explains: "But that was before Katrina. That was before a storm with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima peeled the face off southern Louisiana. That was before one of the most beautiful cities in the Western Hemisphere was killed three times, and not just by forces of nature." For Robicheaux, Katrina is another Vietnam: a new source of pain, outrage, death and disillusion, a final battle for this old soldier to undertake.

"The Tin Roof Blowdown" may be Burke's most ambitious novel because he places this crime story against the backdrop of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, with emphasis not just on the forces of nature but also on the even more shocking damage caused by human greed and violence, by racial hate and by political cynicism and bureaucratic indifference. No matter how awful you now think Katrina was, you'll come away from this novel knowing that it was far, far worse.

At the outset, Robicheaux is looking for a friend, a heroin-addicted priest, who, as the hurricane approached, went to help out in the endangered 9th Ward. The priest found a boat and was trying to save people trapped in the attic of a church when some petty criminals stole the boat. They pilot it to a wealthy Uptown neighborhood, where they make the mistake of taking some valuable diamonds from the deserted home of New Orleans's most vicious mob boss. The mobster seeks revenge, and for the rest of the novel Robicheaux is caught between him and his psychopathic hired killer on the one hand and the equally dangerous but outgunned thieves on the other.

The crime story is as solid and well-written as we have come to expect from the prolific Burke, but it's ground we've covered before. What's dramatically new in the novel is the portrait of the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, both in New Orleans and in nearby New Iberia, where Robicheaux lives and works as a detective (and where Burke lives, too). Burke, one of the most lyrical of crime writers, invests the onrushing hurricane with a terrible beauty: "To the south, a long black hump begins to gather itself on the earth's rim, swelling out of the water like an enormous whale, extending itself all across the horizon. You cannot believe what you are watching." A little later, he reports that "the entire city, within one night, has been reduced to the technological level of the Middle Ages." Some of his descriptions of the sights and smells of the flooded city are almost unreadable. Here, for example, he sums up hundreds of deaths: "They drowned in attics and on the second floors of their houses. They drowned along the edges of Highway 23 when they tried to drive out of Plaquemines Parish. They drowned in retirement homes and in trees and on car tops while they waved frantically at helicopters flying by overhead. They died in hospitals and nursing homes of dehydration and heat exhaustion, and they died because an attending nurse could not continue to operate a hand ventilator for hours upon hours without rest."

In an epilogue, Robicheaux permits himself a moment of sentimentality: "Perhaps the city has found its permanence inside its own demise, like Atlantis, trapped forever under the waves, the sun never harsh, filtered through the green tint of the ocean so that neither rust nor moth nor decay ever touches its face." But he rejects that fantasy and declares that "New Orleans was systematically destroyed and that destruction began in the early 1980s with the deliberate reduction by half of federal funding to the city and the simultaneous introduction of crack cocaine into the welfare projects." The author denounces corporate greed, as when politically connected companies given reconstruction funds skim billions off the top, and he has only scorn for the cynicism and incompetence of state and federal officials who have turned their backs on the victims of Katrina.

Burke, who knows the South well, adds: "Right-wing talk shows abounded with callers viscerally enraged at the fact evacuees were receiving a onetime two-thousand-dollar payment to help them buy food and find lodging. The old southern nemesis was back, naked and raw and dripping -- absolute hatred for the poorest of the poor."

Burke's own anger is equally naked and raw, as it should be. My complaint about "The Tin Roof Blowdown" is that Burke's crime story isn't equal to the larger horror that surrounds it. He denounces political corruption and cynicism, but I wish he'd dramatized it more. I wish he'd shown us less of his mobsters and psychopaths and more of the upstanding businessmen and politicians and talk-show messiahs who profited from the disaster. Perhaps that's unfair -- Burke is a crime novelist, not a political novelist -- and this may be the best fictional portrait of Katrina that we have so far. But there's a bigger, better novel, perhaps by some as-yet-unknown Robert Penn Warren, waiting to be written about this American tragedy.