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The Confession by Domenic Stansberry Hard Case Crime 218 pages ISBN 0843953543
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Domenic Stansberry's latest is among the finest first-person, noir confessionals since Jim Thompson's classic The Killer Inside Me. Addressing them directly, forensic psychologist Jake Danser charms his readers throughout, unable to restrain himself from dropping hints to his true nature. And what cold nature is revealed by the end of this book: not just that of our protagonist but the entire Marin County (San Francisco) judicial system and, by inference, ones nearer to readers' homes. In Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities professional standards gave way to the personal objectives of workers toiling in the nine to five+, politically weighted, routine. And Stansberry is not the first to pitch psychologists as enabling priests in the service of modern science, but here readers' judgements are clouded by the recognition that this story is told from the point-of-view of a skillfully manipulative personality. To Danser, everyone has a manipulative personality, so if there's a hint of paranoia about him, that only seems reasonable. He is accused of something, which turns out to be the strangulation of a mistress we meet in the first chapter. When this murder takes place well into the book, we recognize similarities to another murder, one in which Jake Danser has been acting as an expert witness for defense counsel. Acquaintance with Jake is one of those similarities. And then there's Danser's pesky relationship with his mother. Stansberry has his psychology down pat, and he's a master at doling out information, implied and shown. His "Noir Manifesto," first published in the October 2003 The New Review of Literature, calls for noir to embrace the irrational and illogical in life. The Confession is his example. Danser's internal dialogue is occasionally interrupted by intrusive thoughts. Gradually we suspect that Danser may be hearing these thoughts as voices, and that, while consistent with his point of view, it is up to the reader to recognize they may be incompatible with an undefined world outside Jake Danser's head, one where people supposedly act in the pursuit of truth and justice. But it is their actions in the book, seen from Danser's point of view, that seems most familiar to the noir reader. And don't we all sometimes hear intrusive thoughts as voices? Jake's world is a noir world, and Stansberry has his readers off-balance from the start. Is it really a noir world, or is that just the way Jake sees it? Do people die, even deserve to die, in the natural course of events or have they come to pass at Jake's pleasure? And most chilling of all in The Confession: can we ever be certain? Stansberry demands a new direction for the genre in his Noir Manifesto.
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