sonny wrote:
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> i was disappointed with 'eve's men' by thornburg, tho the man can
> write, no doubt about it and it's not without interest. but following
> 'cutter and bone' it was a let down for me. perhaps every other book
> by him will feel the same, which would be ashame. i will still be
> reading more of him.
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The more recent Thornburgs are weaker than his early stuff. If you liked
Cutter and Bone try Dreamland and To Die In California, not quite as
good, but not too far off either. Meanwhile the success of The Road is
making me consider re-reading Thornburg's end of civilization novel,
Valhalla. I dimly recall that it was critiqued as neo-fascist at the
time, though I even more dimly remember disagreeing.
John
Oh, while I'm at it I've just dug out the entry on Thornburg I wrote for
St James Encyclopedia, donkey's years ago.
_NEWTON THORNBURG_
Newton Thornburg is pretty much the definitive crime writer as outsider.
Nine books in twenty-odd years obsessively work and rework the same
themes. These are stories of loners with harsh, short names - Hook,
Stone, Cutter, Bone, Crow, Cross - who have had their lives tipped out
of their control, generally by fate, the government or both.
Thornburg's first novel _Gentleman Born_ marked out one of his major
themes, the family tragedy. Brandon Kendall is the last remnant of an
old money Midwestern family, his father killed himself, his cousins died
in a boating accident when they were children together, and golden boy
Brandon is intent on going to the bad just as fast and as far as he can.
Gambling and women are his chosen route to oblivion and along the way he
entangles himself in small town corruption. When the end comes it is
bleak and bloody and no surprise
A relatively conventional caper novel, _The Knockover_, followed and
Thornburg's subsequent literary career has tended to oscillate between
these two poles. Family gone bad sagas like _Black Angus_ or _Beautiful
Kate_ have alternated with seemingly more conventional crime novels like
_Cutter And Bone_ (his greatest success, filmed as Cutter's Way),
_Dreamland_, or his most recent work, _The Lion At The Door_.
However the contrast is superficial: all these books are driven by the
same question of how one comes to terms with unbearable loss. Cutter in
_Cutter And Bone_ was crippled in Vietnam, Greg Kendall in _Beautiful
Kate_ tries to come to terms with his sister's death following their
incestuous relationship, Blanchard in _Black Angus_ is losing his dream,
his farm in the Ozarks, Kohl in _The Lion At The Door_ has lost both
farm and family. This theme of loss takes flight as an echo of the
American mood post-Vietnam; a sense that the whole country is losing
control, losing sight of its dream.
In his strangest novel, _Valhalla_, this connection is made all too
explicit. It's an apocalyptic novel of a near future in which America is
gripped by race war, and in it Thornburg's terminal pessimism as to the
state of America leads him into territory uncomfortably close to that
inhabited by the survivalist ultra-right..
Thornburg's pessimism is far more effective in his crime-based novels
like _Cutter And Bone_ and _Dreamland_ whose pace prevents melancholic
wallowing and whose cynicism is all too appropriate to the task of
exposing the corporate roots of American crime. In these two novels
particularly, Thornburg stands as a defiantly individual voice within
the crime canon, bleak and true.
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