Never judge a book by its cover — a rule that also applies to the author-solicited blurbs that appear on most dust jackets.
But let’s make an exception for New Orleans writer Tom Piazza.
The author of nine books, Piazza has a knack for reaching across cultural lines when tapping folks for endorsements: an A-list that includes American icons (Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer), a brainy songwriter (Elvis Costello), a talking-head historian (Douglas Brinkley) and literary stars young and old (Richard Ford, Junot Diaz).
If nothing else, that list hints at the range of Piazza’s interests, all of which come through in his smart new collection of essays and reportage, “Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America.”
It’s a must-read for all kinds of folks.
If you’re a fan of “Treme,” Piazza’s book plunges you into the stew of passions that animate his screenwriting work for the HBO drama series.
If you cheered Piazza’s post-Katrina advocacy work in “Why New Orleans Matters,” you’ll want to see the updates and elaborations that weave through the new collection.
For fiction junkies who value Piazza’s prize-winning novels (“City of Refuge” and “My Cold War”), his new collection is a potent reminder that a novelist’s human sympathies and imaginative breadth are pretty good tools for a journalist, too.
“Straight documentary journalism leaves me cold,” Piazza said. “As a reader, I’m happiest when I get a sense of the person who is talking to me through the story. As a writer, I want the leverage I get from a personal point of view. Putting myself into these nonfiction pieces puts an extra spin on the ball.”
Piazza occupies center stage in the collection, whether trying to get a drunken bluegrass star to the Grand Ole Opry, remembering his first, shy encounters with Mailer or spinning a wild riff on Charlie Chan, Hurricane Katrina and his own frustrations with post-storm recovery.
“This book is my most personal — an autobiography in the form of an essay collection,” Piazza said. “It’s modeled after the wonderful collections of occasional pieces that Mailer produced, starting with ‘Advertisements for Myself.’ I like how he reanimated older pieces, putting them in a fresh, dramatic context by adding interstitial commentary. In that sense, the book is also an homage to a man who was my friend for the better part of three decades.”
“Devil Sent the Rain” gathers pieces that Piazza wrote between 1997 and 2010 for publications that include the New York Times, the Oxford American, Bookforum, and the Huffington Post. By threading these disparate pieces together with a series of new, introductory essays, Piazza makes it clear that he has changed.
For one thing, the deft music journalist of the 1990s has morphed into a successful, 56-year-old novelist — one whose work on “Treme” has influenced his current novel-in-progress.
“Writing for television forces you to be very aware of what each scene is accomplishing. It has sharpened my sense of what needs to be dramatized,” Piazza said. “On the other hand, TV and novels are very different. If you use a voiceover on television, it’s almost always a bad idea. You need to tell the entire story through scenes and dramatic action. A novel that worked like that would be very tiresome. It’s a form that lives and breathes by constantly shifting from drama to exposition — the kind of stuff that often goes into a voice-over.”
Piazza’s biggest changes as a writer didn’t come from TV, however. The push came from Hurricane Katrina, the levee failures, the flawed federal response and the suffering of friends and strangers across New Orleans.
“After such knowledge,” he writes in the new collection, “what forgiveness for the easy, lazy cynicism of the privileged and insulated who flatter themselves that they know the last word about human emotions?”
These days, Piazza said, “I can’t write anything, even a quiet domestic scene, without sensing the things outside that might intrude. It’s like being aware of mortality.”
That new outlook comes through powerfully in “Devil Sent the Rain,” which Piazza describes as falling into two distinct sections.
“The early pieces were animated by a degree of optimism about American culture and society as embodied in the work of some emblematic musical figures — Jimmy Martin, Charley Patton, Carl Perkins,” he said. “They ride on a current of energy generated by a sense of possibility.
“But the later essays move through a set of questions, examining what we’ve learned about ourselves as Americans by making these huge national blunders. I’m thinking about the imperial adventure in Iraq and the huge failure to deal with the disasters of Katrina.
“My sense of possibility took a huge pistol-whipping during the George W. Bush era. Disaster is now the context for everything.”
"Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America"
By Tom Piazza
Harper Perennial (304 pages, $14.99)
Author! Author!
What: Tom Piazza reads from and signs ‘Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America’
When: Wednesday, 6 p.m.
Where: Octavia Books, 513 Octavia St.
Call: 504.899.7323
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