Galveston

Galveston
by Nic Pizzolatto
read: 2014

Galveston is True Detective creator / writer Nic Pizzolatto's first novel. There are some similar themes to True Detective: it's ostensibly a crime novel, though protagonist Roy is on the wrong side of the law. It takes place in the same general area of the country, spilling from New Orleans to Galveston, Texas, and back. Most significantly, it features a hard-boiled character over a long period of time. In both Galveston and True Detective, Pizzolatto uses the passage of time to ruminate on the phenomenon of storytelling. Once events have passed, they exist only in the stories those who remember them tell. An ex-girlfriend of Roy's tells him:

"Listen to me," she said. "The past isn't real." This struck the center of me like a pickax. She said, "you remember what you want."

At another point, after explaining how he got into a life of crime, Roy thinks, "It was true, but the story didn't feel correct. It didn't really explain anything, did it?"

This is how Pizzolatto's worlds are built: on a shaky foundation of stories. The past is malleable, and since in the long run everything is past, all of reality is ultimately subject to the biases and vagaries of those who live to tell about it.

EDIT: That said, Pizzolatto isn't making the case that there's no such thing as objective truth; in fact, the objective truth is important to the characters in the story. Late in the story, Roy is confronted with the choice to tell his story to a new generation or let it die with him, and he elects to keep the truth alive.

Between Here and the Yellow Sea

Between Here and the Yellow Sea
by Nic Pizzolatto
read: 2014

I've been watching the first few episodes of True Detective on HBO, and I thought I'd track down some of creator / writer Nic Pizzolatto's writing. Between Here and the Yellow Sea is his first published work, a collection of short stories. I'd liken it to Flannery O'Connor's short stories in terms of weight and style, as well as the Southern setting. He doesn't do neat or happy endings. Every character seems to be chasing something he can't find, usually a void produced by a death or abandonment.

In a recent interview about True Detective, Pizzolatto talked about his interest in "memory and the idea of an objective truth." That theme permeates Between Here and the Yellow Sea. In "Two Shores," a man learns he may be the father of a child, but the mother and baby are both dead. "It's a truth that can't do anything for you," his girlfriend admonishes him, asking why he pursues paternity tests. "Because it's the truth," he responds. In the title story, the narrator travels across country to find a girl he once knew, only to be stunned when he realizes her eyes are a different color than he remembers in his mind's eye. Pizzolatto's characters are haunted by their false memories, and when they try to fill the voids in their pasts with present substitutes, it predictably ends in tragedy.