My third installment in my rare book reviews is David Goodis'
first novel Retreat from Oblivion. First of all it is a crime
novel. It's noir. It's never been published in
paperback.
I say it's a crime novel, but only tangentially in the way
that most of his later books were. The crime is almost
incidental to the action and isn't the story in and of
itself.
Goodis would never write anything this ambitious again, at
least anything that was published. The action takes place
across three continents and includes two wars as the back
drop--the Spanish Civil War and the Sino-Nippon War. There
are eight characters whose lives intertwine in love and war
in Hemingwayesque fashion. In fact, as a young novelist (he
was 22), Goodis seems to have been influenced quite a bit by
Hemingway, although Retreat from Oblivion predates by a year
Hemingway's own Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bell
Tolls, by a year.
All the elements of later Goodis novels is there, the main
character torn between two women (in this case he's involved
with three women), the self-doubt, the contemplation of
suicide and aimless wandering of the protagonist, who doesn't
seem have a clue as to what he's looking for.
An interesting note is that it has one thing in common with
Kerouac's On the Road published almost twenty years later.
Retreat mentions a tune by Slim Gaillard, who Kerouac extols
at length in On the Road.
Jeff
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 19 May 2008 EDT