In 'Celine,' an Aristocratic Investigator Follows a Taut, Twisting Mystery
This article originally appeared in the April 2017 issue of ELLE.
Like the ingenious heroine in his new novel, Celine (Knopf), Peter Heller is a jack-of-all-trades who worked as a dishwasher, carpenter, and pizza deliverer before he started winning awards for his magazine articles and nonfiction books chronicling his death-defying adventures, such as Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet's Tsangpo River. In recent years, he's been banging out runaway best-sellers, like 2012's The Dog Stars, a sort of Wild West end-of-days adventure that Junot Díaz called "one of those books that makes you happy for literature," and 2014's The Painter, which the New York Times praised for Heller's "keen, worshipful eye when describing the natural world."
With Celine, Heller breaks new ground by creating a female lead, the indomitable private investigator and artist Celine: a New England blue blood born in Paris with a silver spoon in her mouth, which she's traded for a Glock pistol and a modest Brooklyn sculptor's studio. When she isn't solving cases with "a better find rate than the FBI," she fashions pieces "from anything at hand, which often involved skulls." Being a PI "was an odd vocation for someone in the Social Register who had grown up partly in Paris, partly in New York," but AA member Celine has "always rooted for the weak, the dispossessed, the children, for the ones who had no means or power: the strays and homeless, the hapless and addicted, the forlorn, the remorseful, the broken." She often works pro bono. Her specialty? Reuniting birth families, the missing, "those who could not be found."
Like Mark Twain and Toni Morrison, Heller has a rare talent that hooks both literary and commercial readers. The book's irresistible suspense springs from the dynamic between his elegant, visionary imagination as it immerses you in the wilderness of the American West and its sleek-and-scruffy small towns, and his unerring instinct for writing classy, edge-of-your-seat, page-turning whodunits.
The case turns on an international family mystery involving the CIA and foreign governments that Celine, assisted by her devoted husband and sidekick, Pete, is hired to solve. A young woman named Gabriela Ambrosio Lamont seeks out Celine in search of her father, Paul Lamont, a famous photographer who long ago went missing in Yellowstone National Park and was presumed dead under mysterious circumstances. The tall, aristocratic, perspicacious Celine and the laconic, L.L.Bean-clad Pete light out for the majestic expanses of Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming, using every tool available-from state-of-the-art GPS trackers and massive Internet-based data banks to old-fashioned phone taps, library research, and dogged footwork. As Celine's search for Gabriela's father intensifies, her leads crisscross with the bloody political history of Chile during the time of the savage, CIA-backed 1973 presidential coup.
In the course of piecing Gabriela's case together, Celine's own ruptured family history is revealed, from her childhood in Paris to her time in New York and summers on exclusive Fishers Island, off the Connecticut coast. Heller handles scenes and scenarios that guide and haunt Celine's interior life with masterful, emotional, and action-packed strokes, making her one of this year's most unforgettable characters. It's as if Heller took the tender yet tough-as-nails personality of writer Annie Proulx and cast her on the page, in all her plainspoken, intellectually impeccable, deeply wise-and wise-ass-glory.
Like a skier expertly and playfully carving a double-black-diamond trail, Heller creates a breathtaking canvas against which his taut, twisting storytelling unfolds. There is a shimmering quality to his sentences when his characters are out in the elements, exercising their human ingenuity alongside the inscrutable workings of the natural world, in all its beauty and danger. Driving out of Denver into the open range in a camper borrowed from her son, Hank, Celine observes that "the hedgerows and windbreaks of the old cottonwoods were just starting to turn the tenderest of greens. In another month they would be the color of flames."
In a passage that reads like a brilliant coda to the book, Celine and Pete find a campsite for the night near a lake north of Jackson Hole, Wyoming: "Dusk was moving over the water with a stillness that turned half the world to glass. The wall of mountains had gone to shadow as had the reflections at their feet. In the stillness the rings of rising trout appeared like raindrops. Slowly, in silence, the dark water tilted away from the remaining daylight. Celine stepped down from the truck and stretched and walked to the water, smelling its coldness and the scent of someone's cooking fire.… She thought that peace reigned in the world-might reign. But only where love had no ferocity. Where there was the love between mothers and fathers and children there would be no peace."
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