Jerrod Edson's THE BOULEVARD

Not since Robert A. Heinlen*'s Job: A Comedy of Justice gave us the jovial, folksy Devil in the person of Jerry Farnsworth has Old Nick himself aroused my positive emotions as he does in The Boulevard, Canadian novelist Jerrod Edson's not-really Allegherian literary train ride through the Underworld. Though in this case, Jerry Farnsworth is kind of split into two people, the Devil and Ernest Hemingway.

And yes, the third figure on the book cover is Vincent Van Gogh. All aboard!

The premise, or at least the inciting incident, of The Boulevard is pretty simple. A nearly-ignored email, checked almost too late, informs the staff of Hell that, for the first time ever, God Himself is planning on coming down for a visit to see what they've made of the gloomy void he condemned Lucifer and all of his rebels to, eons ago. He's heard such magnificent things...

Only the Rebels have actually just settled it like any of us would in playing a simulation game, starting with mud huts for shelter in the stygian gloom and crafting their way up to something like civilization (occasionally stealing a few resources from the world of humans now and then. Like light. But not enough of it), though they've had to make do with some poor substitutes like painted metal representations of the flowers that won't grow Down Below and were, in a charming early anecdote that would have done the Heinlein of Job proud, the original source of their trouble. They've made a decent go of it, these Infernals have, even unto bringing into being one real miracle of beauty and light that is the great joy of every demon and condemned soul, The Boulevard.

But if God sees that Hell is not, in fact, a lake of fire filled with torment and agony and eternal ugliness, sees that his employees are maybe enjoying their work and afterlives, well, just imagine Elon showing up at a Tesla factory one day and seeing that George Clinton was supplying the house band and all the assembly line workers were enjoying themselves while building cars that not only didn't lock passengers inside at the first sign of an engine fire but also don't treat pedestrians as targets! That's no way to run a torture chamber factory! There'd be Hell to pay. 

OK, I'll stop with the puns and the Heinlein comparisons. Just, Job was baby's first blasphemy book.**

The aforementioned train ride is one that Satan is making across Hell, to meet with his estranged friend and tenant, Van Gogh, without whose work the Boulevard would still just be a dark and depressing street in Hell's Capital City, and break the bad news that his greatest work, his shining triumph, his immortal glory, his 60-block-long celebration of art, has got to go in order to save them all from the literal wrath of God.. Um.

Hemingway just happens to have been on the same train, traveling with a Jean Rhys whose brief appearance is one of The Boulevard's few lowlights. She's drunk, she's disgraceful, she has no reason to be there except as unpleasant comic relief, and for someone Hemingway can bitch about misogynistically. Boo. Anyway, the Devil, Ernie thinks, will be better company, especially since he's in a confessing mood. He seems to carry a lot of guilt over his relationship with Van Gogh. Uh oh.

Much of the meat of the book, thus, consists of Satan narrating the life of Van Gogh as observed by a secret manipulator, now disguised as a magpie and captured in a famous early painting, now scrubbing the floors of his famous room at Arles, now appearing as a chance met companion for an easel-side chat in a wheat field, but always subtly guiding the artist towards the desired end, or ends. This exposition dump -- for that is what it is as far as the frame narrative of the journey is concerned -- could have been just a dull, short retelling of famous scenes from Van Gogh's well-documented life, but the Devil's perspective on them gives them immediacy and freshness, helped along by frequent pauses for Hemingway's usually sardonic commentary. If you're looking for a charming, brief and bittersweet biographical sketch of one of the greatest painters ever to do it, you could do a lot worse than pick up a copy of The Boulevard; it's worth the cover price for this alone, with its entertaining and occasionally profound frame narrative an added bonus that will make you pause and think more than a few times.

Alas, I came away from this a little bit disappointed, because it feels unbalanced. There are a few jumps back to the titular Boulevard where Satan's minions are busy getting ready to undo all of the hard work that has gone into making the Capital City and all of Hell's other cities into the thriving metropolises that they are, but we get only the briefest of glimpses of these. The fact that they're enacted by the likes of Al Capone especially makes these bits feel inadequate for their brevity and their one-note treatment of what is going on; it's all logistics and very little emotion, and Capone and the other doers of Satan's bidding really beg to be fleshed out as characters in the ways that the riders on the train are -- especially Ms. Victoria, the book's other female character, frequently admired for her va-va-voomery but never allowed to become a person even though we learn she's been right there with Satan and the Boys since they were all angels and he went by Lucifer. I wanted this side of the story to have something closer to equal weight with the Satan and Ernie show.

But that show is glorious, and the imbalance isn't enough of a problem to stop me recommending that you pay The Boulevard a visit at your earliest opportunity. After all, unlike Hemingway and Van Gogh and Al Capone, you don't have to die to check it out. You just have to get your hands on a good book.

It's just a bit of a shame that it's not a truly great one.

*I know.

**My disappointment that none of RAH's other books were remotely like this still makes me sigh.