Blues and Trouble

September 29, 1997
This debut collection won a James Michener Award for its stirring rambles from New York to New Orleans.

January 29, 1996
In ``Burn Me Up,'' the most effective of the 12 achingly moody stories in this virtuoso collection, Memphis city councilman Archie Lucas recalls the spring of 1948, when he felt ``a sense of longing and possibility mixed with a strange directionlessness.'' His ennui is later shattered by the rock-and-roll voice of Billy Sundown on the radio. Raunchy Billy is Archie's former schoolmate, and his Jerry Lee Lewis-style fame and troubles have propelled him into a peripatetic world of backwater lounges. The painful counterpoint of these two lives resounds through this and other pieces that contrast pure-on-the-road blues and frustratingly settled existences. Set in motion by the soul-sapping ``Brownsville,'' in which the narrator sits alone in a steamy New Orleans bar and vows to quit running when he gets to dusty Brownsville, a town he has chosen ``because I've got no reason to go there,'' these stories are sequenced in perfect call-and-response rhythm. Piazza has found the common American experience in the attachment-detachment struggle. Ranging from New York City to coastal Texas to Santa Monica, and crisscrossing through Memphis, he draws into his edgy cosmology characters from disparate segments of our population, what Stanley Crouch in his introduction calls ``so many out-of-tune lives'': the diaspora Jew trapped in the commuter ethos (``A Servant of Culture'') as well as the Tennessee trucker who can't act ``right'' in sedate Ohio society (``Memphis''). If there is a flaw here, it is that women are depicted only as speed bumps that throw men off course. Told in a clear tenor voice, Piazza's first collection is as wonderfully dislocating as an all-night drive. Piazza is a recipient of a 1995-96 James Michener Award.