Scott Phillips takes Bill Ogden, protagonist of Cottonwood, and transports him years and miles away for this new novel, The Devil Raises His Own. Phillips also adds a huge cast of scoundrels, strivers, and schemes to make things interesting. This mosaic of a novel roams through all kinds of dingy corners of World War I-era Los Angeles to deliver brutal tales of comeuppance and acceptance.
The first chapters of The Devil Raises His Own provides a good snapshot of what’s to come. Flavia Odgen’s husband comes home in a drunk. When he tries to threaten his wife, Flavia kills him with a baseball bat to the skull. Because her husband was armed with a gun, Flavia isn’t charged with a crime, though her reputation is so damaged that she loses her job. Nothing daunted, Flavia ups stakes and goes to live with her rascal of a grandfather, Bill Odgen, in sunny Los Angeles.
I expected that this book would focus on Flavia and her grandfather but I was quickly disabused of that notion. The parade of characters begins immediately, with a chapter set in a trainyard where two hitchhikers briefly become allies before a sudden act of violence sends them hurriedly in different directions. Before long, we meet a woman who makes blue movies to support her children, an opportunistic couple in a lavender marriage, a black-mailing and sex-addicted postal inspector, and a repellant actor on his way down from stardom. Each of these characters is linked to someone we’ve previously met. It’s only at the end of the book that they all end up in one place at the same time when their various storylines ultimately collide. As I read, I could not get the image of someone frantically spinning plates out of my head.
It’s hard to know quite what to make of The Devil Raises His Own. I can’t think of any other books quite like it. Books with a lot of characters (looking at you, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy) and a lot of subplots tend to make it clear which characters and subplots are most important. But the diffuse focus of The Devil Raises His Own makes it feel as though all of the characters and plots are the primary ones. And, I suppose, might be the point this book wants to make: everyone is the main character in their own story.
Once I stopped trying to figure out who was protagonist, antagonist, or secondary character, I had more fun watching as all these main characters carommed off of each other. That said, there is so much to keep track of in this book that I dropped more than a few metaphorical plates. Readers who like books that break narrative conventions and anarchic characters will enjoy The Devil Raises His Own. I also think this book will appeal to readers curious about the seedier side of early Hollywood.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
