A Little Trouble with the Facts by Nina Siegal

That Vane and Wallace share it so fundamentally provides a connection between them that bridges life and death as naturally as the Queensboro bridges the East River. It originates from the same place as that common vandalistic urge to write “I was here,” and-no matter how soothing it would be to believe such a compulsion is rooted in grand ideas of living on through art-is most often a by-product of chronic insecurity. There is, for example, “the Incident” that instigates Vane’s plummet from grace, an event that leaves her screaming, “Don’t you know who I am?” What has become a clichéd yelp of the glitterati is gingerly subverted throughout the book to become a sweeping statement about the need to be seen, recognized, immortalized. The innovation of the book is in the subtext constructed by her carefully wrought extended metaphors, which surface under new aliases throughout the narrative just as the primary characters do. When evidence accumulates to suggest that Wallace was, in fact, thrown from the Queensboro Bridge, Vane is placed on a fast track either to redemption or to that special rock they keep below rock bottom.īut while the novel never rebels against its heritage, Siegal has subtly rejuvenated the genre.

All Vane can answer is that the police report had said, “jump from bridge,” and she had inferred from there. “Who said suicide?” the caller wants to know. Additionally, in true noir fashion, the plot is rolling from page one, when Vane receives an ominous phone call regarding the obituary of a famous graffiti artist named Malcolm Wallace, aka Stain 149. It is packed with corkscrew twists and dubious personages, and is piloted by Valerie Vane, a beleaguered obituary writer whose incisive first-person narration presents her as an amalgam of a reformed femme fatale and a classic PI. On the one hand, the novel certainly does not attempt to break noir convention. If judged only by its synopsis, Nina Siegal’s debut novel, A Little Trouble with the Facts, would be quickly categorized as a neo-noir, a rehash of mystery/suspense structure contemporized by a slew of modern landscapes and references.

A Little Trouble with the Facts by Nina Siegal