Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
Taking the long way home a review by Art Taylor John Hart. Iron House. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2011.
NCLR Editorial Board member and North Carolina native ART TAYLOR, an Assistant Professor at George Mason University, contributes a monthly literary column to Raleigh’s Metro Magazine and writes frequently on mysteries and thrillers for the Washington Post and Mystery Scene magazine. His fiction has appeared in publications ranging from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine to the North American Review. See his interviews with Margaret Maron in NCLR 1994 and with Michael Malone in NCLR 2011. JOHN HART grew up in North Carolina and attended Davidson College, earning graduate degrees in both accounting and law. For more information, visit his website. Art Taylor reviewed Hart’s three previous novels in NCLR 2009.
John Hart’s first three books, The King of Lies (2006), Down River (2007), and The Last Child (2009), so firmly established a pattern of thematic concerns that it will come as no surprise to find those same motifs and messages at the heart of his latest novel, Iron House. Hart’s books regularly explore how the ties of family and of class don’t just bind but often constrain; examine how people, men usually, burdened by guilty secrets, struggle to atone and forge ahead; and exalt personal sacrifice as an often noble path to redemption. While Hart’s first two novels limited themselves to single perspectives – privileged men, haunted by the past, facing an uncertain future – his third book, The Last Child, broadened that canvas to explore the perspectives of people across wide ranges of age, race, and class. Iron House seems to mark another stage of growth, expanding beyond the milieu of troubled North Carolina families to include as well the dangerous world of organized crime on the mean streets of New York. Michael, the book’s main character, grew up on those mean streets, an orphan from Appalachian North Carolina who ran off to the big city; managed to survive by wit, instinct, and force; and was eventually brought into the mob family of Otto Kaitlin, “[p]ossibly the most powerful crime boss in recent memory” (135). Adopted might be the more apt word here for a number of reasons: Kaitlin treats Michael like a son and feels closer to Michael than to his own flesh and blood son; Michael calls Kaitlin’s real son, Stevan, his brother; and Michael has long followed the principle that family comes first. But Michael isn’t officially family, and worse, he
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suddenly wants out of the organization. He’s fallen in love; his girlfriend, Elena, is pregnant; he has his eye on a new, clean life. Kaitlin himself, aged and near death, grants Michael this opportunity and offers best wishes, but others – most notably Stevan and the merciless Jimmy, who trained Michael – see Michael’s choice as betrayal. As long as the elder Kaitlin lives, Michael is protected, but as soon as the patriarch passes on, Stevan and Jimmy plan to “take care of” Michael in their own way and eliminate the pregnant Elena as well. To say more about what happens in Iron House’s New York sections (roughly the first fifty pages of the book) would diminish some of the considerable suspense and emotional weight of the novel’s opening act – hardly fair to readers who want to experience the thrills of the thriller firsthand – but one twist must be revealed. As Michael escapes from the carnage, Stevan and Jimmy level a threat against someone potentially even more precious to Michael than his pregnant wife: the one real family member he long ago left behind. Twenty-three years earlier, Michael and his younger, frail, and sensitive brother, Julian, had been living in the Iron Mountain Home for Boys, offering “Shelter and Discipline since 1895” (43). But despite that promise, the Iron House of the book’s title was worse than Dickensian for these and other boys. The home’s motto, “Enter child, and know no fear but that of God” (41), might as well have read “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” for all the warmth and safety that the institution offered: negligence from the administrators, a reigning sense of lawlessness, the