Mr. White's Confession

Charles Taylor

Everything about Mr. White's Confession is in flux — the story, the setting, even the author's style. What begins as an atmospheric hard-boiled crime yarn ends up as something much more mysterious and unsettling. Clark steadily builds up an all-but-overwhelming sense of dread, a certainty that the worst we fear will arrive on schedule — only to pull the rug out from under us.

St. Paul, Minn., in 1939, the place and time the book opens, has a ghost-town feel. The characters are part of the crowds on the streets or riding the buses, at the movies or eating at the local White Castle; they could be the last people on earth. "Today passed uneventfully," one character writes in his journal, "although I varied my routine somewhat, leaving the house earlier than usual and walking down the Lawton Steps to catch the Grand Avenue streetcar instead of my regular route." The proprietor of a dime-a-dance hall talks about how times are getting better. It doesn't feel that way. As Pennies from Heaven did, Mr. White's Confession presents a world of shabby, middle-class gentility perched on top of awful secrets.

Someone is murdering St. Paul's dime-a-dance girls, and both evidence and instinct lead the police to Herbert White. An odd loner with a Humpty Dumpty build and a faulty memory (he can recall things that happened years before, but the recent past is a blur), Herbert spends hours on his journal and scrapbook, trying to record the events he knows will soon slip from his mind. He's also drawn to pretty women, writing fawning fan letters to his favorite starlet and photographing dance-hall girls in demure poses. Herbert's doughy politeness, his remove from the world, seems at first a cover for an overage virgin's boiling hostility. But as Herbert goes from born culprit to born patsy, even that transformation doesn't take the full measure of his character, the way his infuriating obstinacy, his inability to perceive more than what's in front of him, signifies a kind of decency and integrity, even though that failure prevents him from saving himself.

Clark's slowly unfolding irony is that each character shares something of Herbert's myopia, and they're even less able to save themselves. The dime-a-dance girls, the cops working the case, a teenage runaway who becomes both the wife and daughter one cop has lost — all of them remain essentially isolated. And that realization, breaking like a slow wave across the length of the book, leaves a chill that persists.

At times, Clark's approach feels less unpredictable than unformed. He's using genre borrowings for a novel more fluid and resonant than genre conventions usually allow, and it's not a seamless blend. (His conscientiously descriptive prose occasionally seems too fancy for the material, an attempt to put on airs.) But the book's elusiveness pulls you in. The mystery of who killed the girls has a solution that's obvious early on; the mystery of where Clark's characters are headed has no easy solution, though their destinations seem obvious. The unexpected compassion he shows his characters is finally much more unsettling than the irreversible fates we're certain await them. Maybe that has something to do with their refusal to stay boxed up within a genre. By the end of Mr. White's Confession, they've traveled awfully far, and awfully close.
— Salon

Greil Marcus

Clark plays tricks with the conventions of genre. He offers the illusion of distance and safety and ends up producing a sense of displacement so shivery and complete that the result is as thrilling as it is unnerving.
— Esquire

Publishers Weekly

By opening with a long epigraph from St. Augustine's Confessions (in the original Latin, no less), Clark's ambitious, atmospheric rumination on good, evil and the gray area in between announces intentions far loftier than those of the standard dime-store detective novels to which the book bears an intentional but superficial resemblance. Set in St. Paul, Minn., in the bleak winter of 1939, this high-brow thriller retains enough lowdown grit and grime to qualify as both a suspenseful read and a surprisingly touching character study. When two young "dime-a-dance" girls are murdered, tough-as-nails homicide cop Lieutenant Wesley Horner hones in on eccentric recluse and amateur photographer Herbert White as the prime suspect. Looking like a cross between Humpty Dumpty and Paul Bunyan, and equally obsessed with Hollywood starlet Veronica Galvin and the voluminous scrapbooks and journals he keeps in order to compensate for his (narratively convenient) memory loss, White takes the fall with sympathetic dignity: astute readers will have fingered the real culprit many pages earlier. The true mysteries here are psychological: Horner's morally suspect relationship with teenage drifter Maggie is particularly fascinating. Having previously written a biography of James Beard (The Solace of Food), a cultural history of the Columbia River (River of the West) and a critically lauded first novel (In the Deep Midwinter), Clark here seesaws, most often successfully, between hard-boiled cliches and an earnest, self-conscious concern with the natures of memory and love.

Library Journal

Is solitary eccentric Herbert White involved in the murders of two young women, or is his short-term memory failure really pathological, as he claims? As in the author's acclaimed first novel (In the Deep Midwinter, LJ 12/96), this psychological mystery is set in Minnesota in the mid-20th century. Wesley Horner is a seemingly hardened police lieutenant with a tragically fragmented family. The triumph of his pursuit and capture of pitiful suspect Herbert is cut short, however, when Horner's new sweetheart thinks that the man might be innocent. Fellow officer Welshinger is a bit too conscientious in extracting a confession from White. Damning evidence telegraphs to the reader the identity of the real murderer, since the real point is not whodunit but whether or not the truth will emerge. A literary treat for procedural fans, this belongs in all libraries.--Margaret A. Smith, Grace A. Dow Memorial Lib., Midland, MI

Barbara McMichael

Complex…intriguing…a fascinating and timely journey in the American psyche
—Seattle Times

Dan Cryer

Strong, brutal…Clark's most striking achievement with Herbert's ambiguity, making it appear at once vulnerable and threatening.
—Newsday

Merle Rubin

A novel of substance…reveals the subtlety of [Robert Clark's] artistry and the profundity of his vision.
—The Wall Street Journal

Pico Iyer

A pulsing tale of redemption and original goodness.
— Time Magazine

Kirkus Reviews

Clark's second fictional slice of St. Paul history (In the Deep Midwinter, 1997) goes back to 1939 — and the most tender account of a sex-killing investigation you'll ever read. If it weren't for his size and his limping gait, making him look like an overgrown teddy bear, no one would ever notice Herbert White, an inoffensive clerk at Griggs-Horner whose only pleasures in life are the letters he writes to an indifferent Hollywood starlet; the copious journals he keeps as an attempt to compensate for his flawed memory — he can remember yesterday, and his childhood, but not much in between — and his photography sessions with the women he meets at the Aragon Ballroom. When one of his models, Carla Marie LaBreque (née Charlene Mortenson), is strangled, Homicide Lt. Wesley Horner questions White and even finds some promising evidence against him. But all too soon it's clear that the lead is a dead end; as the Aragon survivors agree, White couldn't harm a soul. But then a second Aragon dancer is found murdered, and witnesses place White at the scene. By this time, he can't remember meeting Wesley before; he certainly can't remember either killing or not killing Ruby Fahey; and he's a ready target for a bullying Vice cop who's eager to euchre him into a confession, sign Wesley's name as witness, and send him to prison for life. By the time Wesley, whose fragile romance with a teenaged runaway mirrors White's own stumbling attempts at intimacy, rouses himself on White's behalf, the story seems headed toward an inescapably melodramatic climax. But because Clark's true subject isn't the mystery of the Aragon dancers' murders (wound up in a brilliantly offhand sentence),but the sovereign power of memory to nurture desires that would otherwise never survive, his closing scenes amount instead to a transfiguration of his decent, tempest-tossed heroes. Despite its florid subject, then: a gently, powerfully moving demonstration of the ways, as White concludes, that "we are but memory enfleshed by love."