The Seven League Boots

Given how much time I spend fiddling with words and assessing their worth, you'd think I'd be concerned with book reviews, back cover copy, etc. Not so much. I don't look at book reviews of anything I haven't read yet—they don't interest me and often leave me jaded. If I'm in the mood for a new author, I almost always choose based on title. Or cool cover art. Usually in a Vintage edition. It's a simple science that has little to do with what's inside the book (caveat: I do read the first paragraph now and then to make sure it's not total crap. But Vintage rarely puts its brand on crap.)

Sometimes I get burned, but for the most part, this system works just fine. And it served me well recently with The Seven League Boots by Albert Murray. I discovered after finishing the book that Mr. Murray is "our great literary practitioner of the blues idiom," but I'd never heard of the guy. His narrative style tends toward excess—the protagonist, Scooter (band nickname: Schoolboy), is a prodigal bassist with a dizzying intellect, an improbable ability to quote verbatim all the authors and historians in the Western canon, and unfailing success with women—but it's hard not to like a story that's almost entirely about playing the 1920s jazz circuit.

Schoolboy got on my nerves at first ("And I had said, In other words it may also be as Lord Raglan the Fourth Earl of Fitzgerald suggests in his book about the origins of civilization when he points out that the most natural state of human existence may be a state of low savagery. But even so, if there is always entropy. there is also always the ineluctable modality of the perceivable.") Yeah, that's just how all the twentysomething musician guys I know talk.

But Murray's mad descriptive skills got me over my failed suspension of disbelief in his dialogue, and then he moved the story to France and let Schoolboy ride around on buses through the Provençal countryside and go to cafés and jazz clubs in Paris. And there was much rejoicing.

I had to look up the title a minute ago, since I had no idea what it meant while I was reading, but I'm not sure it matters. It got the book off the shelf at Pegasus and into my hands, so that's good enough.