Nick Stefanos is the drunkest character I've ever spent time with in a book.

He's been drunk since I met him in A Firing Offense. He stayed that way through most of Nick's Trip. Now, to his credit, he's acknowledging he has a problem, and he barely bristles when people give him shit about it. He's accepted his alcoholism the same way old people with ulcers accept theirs by dropping a raw egg into their morning corkscrew.

Nick isn't just drunk. He's used up. He's depressed. He's borderline suicidal. In the last two books, his shaky, self-cleansing pursuits of gritty justice for the lives that fall between the cracks of upper-class conspiracies read like righteous journeys. This is a doomed one. In those, Nick happened upon the cases like he was pushed into rabbit holes of increasingly sick and sad deceptions. In this, he's the instigator, getting involved in a world that would have solved itself without his intervention. In a very intentional way, Pelecanos makes it bleakly clear that Nick is doing this for himself, and what this is really about is the man's struggle with his own nothingness.

Nick is tough for me to root for because, let's face it, he's a brobag. He drunk-drives blinder than Mr. Magoo and drinks in the shower harder than Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. He is the harsher, more damned prototype of Jimmy McNulty (an observation I stole from a bookstore employee's recommendation shelf). But watching his willful descent to the bottom-of-bottoms intertwine with these pretty compelling and expansive mysteries is both fun and knee-slappingly dark. Nick doesn't just fuck-up: he straps TNT to his chest and makes every bad call in the book, and I don't know if Pelecanos wanted us to laugh at this sad sack, but it's tough not to at the sheer extremes of his self-destructiveness.

Pelecanos is one of the most honest 20th century writer's I've come by. The bulk of this book is descriptions. If you shaved off the environmental storytelling, you'd have 50 pages or less of book. In Nick's Trip I found this overly depressing, as George went out of his way to make pedestrians more hostile than the NPCs you find in Grand Theft Auto. Down by the River feels more realistic because, almost like he's a homeless person, people cross out of Nick's way and actively avoid him. He, at incredible length, writes these environments disgustingly well; after a while, this becomes the book equivalent of Smell-O-Vision.

Nick dresses worse than I do and gets beat up constantly (appearing to enjoy taking punishment more than dealing it) and sweats liquor so much he's downright repulsive. He's an enabler for his alcoholic journalist girlfriend, and my favorite character in the book is her father, who pulls him aside and says "Hey, you're cool and everything, but seriously, fuck off, you're killing my daughter just by being who you are."

Just by breathing, Nick infects people with this... venom. Characters act out when they're around him. The plenty likable Jack LaDuke becomes a roided-up version of Nick's worst tendencies by the end of the book, and the only person who likes him for who he is--Lyla, his girlfriend--takes up his habit of drinking on the job. In reality, we need to give people more credit than calling them personality-adopters just by being in the same vicinity of a likable shithead, but as fiction, it's mighty compelling to watch the people Nick cares about morph into mirrors before his eyes.

By the end of the novel, he's doing things he knows are useless and violent for the sake of violent, but he's doing them because he has no other way of proving to himself that he's capable of sticking on the right side. He doesn't know how to be that semi-good person anymore. Nick pushes everybody who likes him away for the obvious reason: to save them. It's a cliche in crime stories, but here it really hits, because you know he's shaping up to spend the rest of his life this way. He ends up so alone you can hear the whirs of the isolated bar we leave him closing up for the night, pouring a drink for himself, gearing up for another bender.

We've watched him shave self-respect and dignity and basic hygiene away through every page of every book. We've had good times with him, but now he's that sad friend who slurs that there's no point in growing up tomorrow if we'll still be the same people we are today.

Anyway. Amazing writing, amazing dialogue, amazing ending. Good to see Johnny McGinnes again.