Black Flies (Soft Skull, 185 pages, $16.50), the second novel by former New York paramedic Shannon Burke, is journal-like, telling in its narrative and laden with speeches. Despite that, it is also a balls-to-the-wall read with lucid writing that makes very little in the way of tonal missteps. Creative writing instructors and workshop pimps be damned. If you’re lucky enough to have a good story to tell, you don’t need much else.
Burke’s story is set in the early 1990s at a paramedic station in Harlem. It’s the cusp of the oncoming Giuliani-era but crack addiction is still peaking. Rookie paramedic and med school also-ran Ollie Cross is dropped into this fray and partnered with lifers, would-be angels of death, drunks and — in the book’s 13th step of gallows humour — one medic who practices his ventriloquism with a puppet on patients. Anyone who’s ever held a job in a mostly male field that’s low on pay but high on adrenaline will know Burke’s character sketches aren’t far-fetched. Since such fields also thrive on initiation, Black Flies’ plot pivots on Cross’s gore-drenched grooming by Rutkovsky, a talented medic 20-years-too-long-on-the-job and heading for a meltdown that may catch Cross in its wake.
In the first pages, Rutkovsky casually lets a patient come close to flatlining as a way to force Cross into learning how to intubate. Later, when he asks what the black bar medal on Rutkovsky’s uniform is for, his tutor replies that it’s from his Vietnam tour, “for a confirmed kill.” Cross’ early optimism about saving lives is squelched steadily from there on until his med school–bound girlfriend dumps him and all his non-EMS friends disappear. What’s left is the job, and Burke’s depiction of anonymous people being shot, ODing or being crushed in tenement elevators. Writing with detachment, Burke succeeds in channelling the baggy-eyed resignation of his characters.
Rutkovsky’s eventual ruin is as grim a tableau ever put on paper but it comes too soon in the book. In comparison, what follows feels pat as Cross alternates between two new partners: the psychopathic LaFontaine and the perversely polite Verdis. The combination effectively drives Cross to the sane decision of leaving his job.
If that seems a less than dramatic resolution, remember: the ceaseless business of dying is a tough racket to capture. While death laughs at everything, including plot arcs, Burke laughs back as much as he can.