The Urban Fiction Book Corner discussion

In _Down There_ (retitled _Shoot the Piano Player_ after the Truffaut film came out) hope glides into a miasma of bleakness for Edward Webster Lynn, once a concert pianist. Eddie knows he failed his wife Maria at the worse possible moment. He tries to escape his guilt for her suicide by fighting and drinking: willingly self-destructive acts. He replaces his love for her with compassion for cats. When Lena, a waitress at Harriet's Hut, a sawdust bar where Eddie plays the piano, falls for Eddie, her challenge to the cage he has built for himself is so painful that he thinks of her touch as a stab with a hat pin.

After fate (in the form of monstrous bad luck) takes Lena from Eddie as it had taken Maria, Eddie returns to the Hut. His fingers, stretching out in a gesture of need, play for the patrons, a “warm and sweet” sound. A sense of community is as powerful as the search for fulfillment outside oneself. Its gift is the need to persevere, to continue to hang together even in frustration and squalor. The perseverance seems to be an absolute in itself. Eddie could not have reached that point without experiencing that moment when he betrayed, if only for a momentous instant, a loved one. *Suffering intertwines with a need to reach out and touch—at the end of the novel, the touch is (a) the keys of the piano at Harriet’s Hut AND (b) the hearts of the straight-backed, aging regulars whom Harriet, and now Eddie, take care of.*
This is how Goodis ends _Down There_: “Who’s playing that? He opened his eyes. He saw his fingers caressing the keyboard.”