Jul. 23rd, 2019 04:17 pm
This kiss is for someone else
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muckefuckMore reading! On Saturday, I started on another Woodrell novel, Give me a kiss; I finished it Monday night. (And that's with Sunday being mostly a lost day due to my stumbling home at 4 a.m.)
It's a very much a transitional novel from the period where he was reinventing himself as an Ozarkian author. The subtitle is even "A Country Noir". The protagonist is a Mary Sue: a rural writer whose work is pigeonholed as "genre" but who still hopes to break into the world of respectable fiction. He returns to his hometown on an errand from his parents where he gets caught up in his brother's get-rich scheme.
There's a lot of wish-fulfillment in these pages: His brother's girlfriend has an impossibly gorgeous and precocious virgin(!) daughter who just happens to fall head over heels for him. The scheme brings our man the notoriety he's been chasing, with profiles in Esquire and cash advances for his next novel.
The writing, too, made me cringe at times. There's a surfeit of clichés (some of them cornpone enough to be dad jokes) and a lot of folksy asides on Ozark history and customs. Worst of all, it's littered with gratuitous references to the first-person narrator's past-life regression therapy. I guess Woodrell was trying to give voice to his atavistic hillbilly side, the sense of connexion to place that drew him back to where he grew up, but all it does is grate and distract.
It feels like a lot of this is padding to compensate for the thinness of the plot, which could be adequately explained in a sentence. There are more violent scenes than in other Woodrell novels but they have less impact; that pervasive sense of dread, the omnipresent feeling that something awful could happen at any moment that I get from his later novels just isn't there yet.
All in all, the novel is mainly interesting for the insight into where he came from, both as a writer and as a person. It's a snapshot of him going home to cultivate an authentic voice. Most of the biographical details check out, so I feel fairly comfortable assuming that most of the narrator's musings coincide with Woodrell's own take on things (at least circa the early 90s).
Still, it's not a terrible novel, so if this is the nadir of his œuvre, I'm pretty square with the notion of becoming a Woodrell completist. I've already read his trio of early noir works (set in the more marketable boondocks of Louisiana) and he hasn't published anything new in six years, so that leaves me just two historical novels: The maid's version (which I own already) and Woe to live on, the basis for the film Ride with the Devil (which I watched long enough ago now that it probably won't colour my reading of it too much).
It's a very much a transitional novel from the period where he was reinventing himself as an Ozarkian author. The subtitle is even "A Country Noir". The protagonist is a Mary Sue: a rural writer whose work is pigeonholed as "genre" but who still hopes to break into the world of respectable fiction. He returns to his hometown on an errand from his parents where he gets caught up in his brother's get-rich scheme.
There's a lot of wish-fulfillment in these pages: His brother's girlfriend has an impossibly gorgeous and precocious virgin(!) daughter who just happens to fall head over heels for him. The scheme brings our man the notoriety he's been chasing, with profiles in Esquire and cash advances for his next novel.
The writing, too, made me cringe at times. There's a surfeit of clichés (some of them cornpone enough to be dad jokes) and a lot of folksy asides on Ozark history and customs. Worst of all, it's littered with gratuitous references to the first-person narrator's past-life regression therapy. I guess Woodrell was trying to give voice to his atavistic hillbilly side, the sense of connexion to place that drew him back to where he grew up, but all it does is grate and distract.
It feels like a lot of this is padding to compensate for the thinness of the plot, which could be adequately explained in a sentence. There are more violent scenes than in other Woodrell novels but they have less impact; that pervasive sense of dread, the omnipresent feeling that something awful could happen at any moment that I get from his later novels just isn't there yet.
All in all, the novel is mainly interesting for the insight into where he came from, both as a writer and as a person. It's a snapshot of him going home to cultivate an authentic voice. Most of the biographical details check out, so I feel fairly comfortable assuming that most of the narrator's musings coincide with Woodrell's own take on things (at least circa the early 90s).
Still, it's not a terrible novel, so if this is the nadir of his œuvre, I'm pretty square with the notion of becoming a Woodrell completist. I've already read his trio of early noir works (set in the more marketable boondocks of Louisiana) and he hasn't published anything new in six years, so that leaves me just two historical novels: The maid's version (which I own already) and Woe to live on, the basis for the film Ride with the Devil (which I watched long enough ago now that it probably won't colour my reading of it too much).