Calista's latest effort, The Devil and the Deep Sea, is a subtle and nuanced examination of the way we negotiate the terrain between art and law, and the extent to which personal dimensions govern that space. The story, which is set in the early 1980s, is loosely based on the artwork "Shoot" by Chris Burden, in which Burden was shot in the arm with a .22 rifle. In real life, there were no legal consequences. In Calista's version, the matter comes to the attention of Louis Gelb, a prosecutor in Memphis, Tennessee. Gelb vacillates, but ultimately he brings charges against Robert Fink—not the artist, but a friend of the artist who was roped into the art project and who pulled the trigger. The artist, Jim Sullivan, is also charged, but the charge—disturbing the peace—results only in a 30-day suspended sentence and a $50 fine. Sullivan pays up, and no controversy is generated.
But Gelb brings felony charges against Fink, and this stirs up the hornets' nest that drives the rest of the book. Fink is an earnest college student who simply thought he was helping Jim Sullivan, his idol, produce an avant-garde work of art. Gelb and his wife are ostracized from their social circle in Memphis, and Gelb comes under heavy criticism from the media.
Calista has a sharp eye for the ways that people's responses, varied and fluid at first, harden over time. She also writes insightfully about the way that the reaction of Memphis's elites says as much about their insecurities and ambitions as it does about Gelb and Fink. Gelb brought his family to Memphis after his wife was threatened on a subway in New York, and his arrival in the city was heralded as a sign that Memphis was cosmopolitan enough to compete with bigger, higher-status cities. Now his decision to prosecute Fink is portrayed in the New Yorker and elsewhere as a sign of the city's provincialism and redneck mentality.
Why does Gelb insist on prosecuting Fink? The book gives us several possible answers. The one that puts Gelb in the best light involves a case that came to him as a junior prosecutor in New York. A black teenager, relentlessly bullied because of his obesity, took an unloaded handgun to school as a last-ditch effort to scare his tormentors into leaving him alone. Gelb believed this was a desperate strategy employed by an otherwise sweet-tempered and law-abiding young man, but he was forced to bring weapons charges that ended the boy's high school career and effectively ruined his life. Gelb dwells on the disparity of outcomes... a scared black kid makes a mistake and ruins his life, whereas an entitled white kid knowingly shoots someone and wants to get off scot-free. Fink's lawyer doesn't help matters when he tells Gelb that his client is "a good kid... not one of those," gesturing at the jail cells behind them, filled mostly with black men.
But darker motivations may lurk beneath. Gelb's marriage is in trouble, and it is hard to exaggerate how big a chip he has on his shoulder about his working-class upbringing. His wife's old boyfriends, as well as a friend she reconnects with over the course of the novel, are all upper-middle-class Jews... much like Fink.
It is also pretty clear that while Gelb enjoys his initial success with high society in Memphis, even then he despises the city's small, monochromatic, unsophisticated upper class. After a cocktail party, Gelb won't stop mocking their acquaintances ("Oh, yes, I so enjoyed Wuthering Heights by Jane Austen. Such appreciation for the classics these Southerners have!"). This sparks one of the ugliest fights between Gelb and his wife, and the next day Gelb learns that a hospital has reported a gunshot injury to the police, launching his involvement in the Fink case.
Several chapters follow a New Yorker writer who is dispatched to Memphis to cover the story, and in many ways these chapters are the most illuminating in the book. Sullivan, for instance, gives a several-page monologue on the borderline between art and non-art, his role in exploring that boundary, and Gelb's role in defining it according to the dictates of his conscience. But Sullivan, wracked with guilt over Fink's involvement, ultimately decides to take a much more simplistic line, calling Gelb a bullying cretin and joining the calls for his dismissal. Calista plays this as an understandably human reaction, but also as a betrayal of Sullivan's artistic integrity. In some ways Sullivan's struggle is the moral heart of the book.
I actually had a chance to sit down with Calista to discuss the book at the 92nd Street Y, and the conversation touched on some very interesting points. Here is a partial transcript:
James: Let me start by saying that this book is almost certainly top 10 for the year. I mean, I don't want to sort of pre-shadow—
Calista: You don't want to spoil the much-anticipated—
James: —right, the highly anticipated James top-10 list. That's going to be clickbait in like the middle of December. But anyway this book is just stunning, but counter-intuitively I want to start with maybe my biggest criticism, which is in the nature of a missed opportunity.
Calista: Is this about the jury deliberations? Because you know, it's interesting, I had originally written it—
James: No, forgive me, no, it's just. You've got Memphis high society, you've got the smaller circle of Jewish, I don't want to call them intellectuals, but highly educated Jews who are friends of the Gelbs. And you've got this New Yorker writer, and the larger media culture. And the sentiment is, this guy is a philistine. He's Memphis at its worst, redneck... That's sort of, initially the response is much more varied, but things kind of solidify and everyone gets on the same page. Even Sullivan.
Calista: That's right, I'm really glad that came through, because that was absolutely... you know, the book is set in the 1980s, but in a lot of ways I think you see this dynamic today on Twitter. People don't know what to make of something, and so they—
James: Okay, but here it is. The guy's name is Louis Gelb. Lou Gelb. And I sort of thought to myself, why not name him Phil E. Stein? Get it? Phil E. Stein. It's even a Jewish name.
[long pause]
Calista: Well, let me put it this way. I think that's a joke that only someone at your intellectual level would really appreciate.
James: You know, I guess that's right, the book needs to work on all levels. It needs to work for people who might not have quite my level of... but you know, won't it just go over those people's heads? Won't it be, like, no harm no foul? Like if you get it, great, but if you're maybe a little less intelligent, a little less sensitive to literary allusions...
Calista: Is that a... is that a literary allusion, really?
James: Let's move on.
