hi everybody!
I finished Derek Raymond's HE DIED WITH HIS EYES OPEN at the
end of last week. It was good. At first I moaned a bit about
the artsy Hammett artifice of making the detective anonymous,
but Raymond did a better job of it than Hammett. Raymond's
good at both describing the bleak city landscape and the
characters. Like Goodis, he can flesh out a vivid and sharp
portrait of a character in two or three pages. Raymond sets
his detective on the edge, and there's a chance that he might
lose his balance and take the plunge and end up in the moral
abyss with most of the other characters.
Raymond is good at describing the lowest you can ima- gine,
and then jerking the floor out from beneath you and letting
you see how much further there is to go. He describes an
abandoned apartment:
"Torn paper and old rent books were spread all over the
floor, there was a stripped bedstead with one leg jacked up
on a brick; a urine stain in the centre of the mattress
curled importantly in the material like the dirty oval frame
of an old picture; a stock of horror comics had toppled over
in a corner. The room opposite was the same except that the
wallpaper was peeling off and it stank worse because the
bucket that had been used to piss in hadn't been emptied.
'Christ,' I muttered,
'who'd be a copper?' The back room had been converted into a
bathroom and toilet; a rat slid up the wall as I opened the
door, with a flick of its fat tail."
Now this is pretty darned bad. But then he makes it all that
much worse:
"I was surprised no squatters had moved in..."
The last time I read such a shocking description of the
conditions of poverty was the scene in Earl Thomp- son's A
GARDEN OF SAND where Jack peers around the door while the
officials are hauling off the drug addicts who did the
murder/suicide thing.
I WAS DORA SUAREZ sits on the shelf, waiting for me to quit
being so damned anal and repeat an author.
**************** I read a short novel called 52 PICKUP, by
Elmore Leonard, over the weekend. It was an interesting and
enjoyable story, with a good plot and well-drawn characters.
But it didn't move me. Austin Powers would say, "No mojo,
baby." The plot had plenty of room for tension, but the
narrative never found it. It was still a fun ride.
**************** I just finished Harry Crews's A FEAST OF
SNAKES. This was an intelligent and powerful and moving book.
I hated the ending. I expected something a little more
interesting. I was very disappointed. Are there any Crews
fans out there who can recommend any of his other books? I
think I kinda like country noir. I'd say Benedict's THE DOGS
OF GOD fits this subgenre, and I liked it a lot. Hardboiled
hot nasty noir. I'm starting to see some common threads, like
using animal scenes as an allegory for the human situation.
THE DOGS OF GOD had that scene where the wild pigs smash thru
a house, totalling it. A FEAST OF SNAKES has rattlesnakes
feeding and pit bulls fighting. I think the message is that
animals are not good or evil, but yet their actions can
easily be seen as such, which should lead one to thinking
that labelling any behavior, man or animal, as good or evil
is misleading and naive at best, and a gross perversion of
the truth at worst. I think this is what Cormac McCarthy was
selling in BLOOD MERIDIAN, too, only he used a total excess
of human violence to deliver the point instead of animal
scenes.
Has anybody read Erskine Caldwell's TOBACCO ROAD or GOD'S
LITTLE ACRE? I'm going to read one of those, but I don't know
which is better.
miker
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