Books I "read" on the I-5

The Vatican's Exorcists: Driving Out the Devil in the 21st Century, by Tracy Wilkinson.
Kudos and jabs to Wilkinson for neither succumbing to a Faces of Death-style exploitation piece, nor extrapolating her way into philosophical or anthropological explanations for the persistence of exorcisms and exorcists in the life of the Church.

An LA Times bureau chief, Wilkinson gains access to several 'live' exorcisms, and does the worthy work framing the Enlightenment and Counter-Reformation contexts in which "modern" exorcism and its supporting theology emerged. Most interesting are Wilkinson's profiles of four exorcists, career priests who've found themselves on the wrong end of the Church for varyingly flagrant attempts to foreground demonic possession, Satan, and 'evil' as such in the lives of their parishoners. The various exorcists are smart, sallow, sardonic, steadfast, opportunistic, etc., just like other real people you know.

While not as even-handed as Blatty's telling of The Exorcist, Wilkinson respectfully sits psychologists and exorcists at the table and allows them to say their pieces. It's only in off-handed moments that Wilkinson betrays what seems like a kind of moral functionalism, if not a politicized "moral economy" approach. In bits of narration we are jostled into juxtaposing modernity, industry, etc., with a deficit of spirit and ecstasy. It's kind of rote, kind of trite, and completely ubiquitous in any and every exposition on religious culture of this day and age, be it from PhDs or shock-jocks.

Mourners: A Nameless Detective Novel, by Bill Pronzini

Pronzini is a seasoned elder statesman of the pulp-worshipping, locked-room-murder-puzzle, lone-existentialist-gumshoe-in-hippie-California genre. If you're me, this last is another way of saying "Pronzini is essentially workmanlike at churning out that which helps pattyjoe breathe."

I've read six or seven installments from this series that began in the 70s, and features the aforementioned "Nameless" protagonist adrift like some Ulysses, solving mods' murders in alternately white ethnic, hippified and multicultural San Francisco. This time I jumped out of sequence, ahead into the 2000s, to find Our Man having undergone important but non-radical personal life changes. Meanwhile, Nameless stays entertainingly busy as people keep dying in weird, intellectually-sexualized ways in CA (thank god for that!)

You are familiar with those two iconic American filmic achievements, Polanski's Chinatown and Altman's Long Goodbye?

Well, if you know these films you will recognize Nameless' alienation before 2005 SF, CA. However, knowing these films, you will also wonder if Nameless' alienation stems from something inward, and if his external sociopolitical surroundings aren't just a useful scapegoat.

There's a weird "I guess I just wasn't made for these times" thread that runs through Chandler, Ross MacDonald et. al., that typifies a sort of "California PI" vibe that's now truly a global, multimedia phenomenon... Is it a sort of pop existentialism, like the kind Fredric Jameson locates in the work of Philip Roth and Dog Day Afternoon? I dunno. I just know that Pronzini is a worthy vessel for another instantiation, another reiteration of this timeless-yet-oddly-timely format. Praise to him!