Winners, losers and two more complaints about editing

I'll ease out of Daniel Woodrell country with the observation that none of the characters in the three novels that make up the "Bayou Trilogy" is a winner in anything like the conventional sense.  Call me sentimental, but I call that a refreshing perspective.

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An excavation into the book pile today turned up a mystery set in contemporary times with a prologue in the fourth century A.D. that had arrows being fired, meaning shot. Flaming arrows were used as early as the ninth century B.C., Wikipedia tells me, but I recall no indication that these arrows were of that variety. I also suspect that to fire as a synonym for to shoot or discharge a weapon did not enter English until after the invention of gunpowder and guns well after the fourth century. That would make its use in this book a distracting anachronism.

The same excavation turned up a book that referred to a man who killed a number of women over more than a decade as a "mass murderer." He was not. He was a serial killer.

Where were the editors of these books?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Wodehouse on the Bayou

Daniel Woodrell may not remind anyone else of P.G. Wodehouse, but both authors build fictional worlds so convincing that every utterance, every description, no matter how utilitarian its place in the narrative, is extraordinary. The smallest bit contains the seeds of the whole.

In Woodrell's Bayou Trilogy, it's quite a whole, full of "last-call Lotharios from along the Redneck Riviera" and folks who say things like "You ever think maybe you're brain-damaged a little bit, there, Slade?" — wonderful, colorful stuff without, however, mugging for the camera. There are no caricatures here, perhaps because Woodrell has such respect and sometimes heartbreaking compassion for his characters.

No caricatures in the matter of place, either. Woodrell's  slice of the American South is full of variegated human micro-climates, with insiders, outsiders, and all manner of regional differences and rivalries.  It's a much richer and more  dynamic and human depiction than one generally gets of that part of America. 

The Bayou Trilogy (Mulholland Books) packages three of Woodrell's early novels set in the fictional St. Bruno, Louisiana: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing and The Ones You Do. They're crime novels, and the first two are in rough outline something like Hammett's Red Harvest: outsiders come to a politically corrupt town, try to muscle in, and stir up trouble that includes larceny and murder. But the storytelling is so rich that it feels entirely new.

My only quibble with the first two novels in the trilogy (I've just begun the third) is that the ending to Under the Bright Lights feels just the tiniest bit forced, as if Woodrell could not quite figure out what to have his protagonist do once the action had been resolved. But that doesn't mean much set against what had gone before. I'm ready to rank these books among the great experiences of my reading life.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Daniel Woodrell's lesson in creating a sense of place

Three of Daniel Woodrell's early novels, released in an omnibus edition as "The Bayou Trilogy," cross a border that is for me as real as that to any foreign country.

That's because passages like this, from early in Under the Bright Lights, give me a vivid feeling of being in a place distinctive and different from my usual surroundings, and that's what crossing borders is all about:

"He had tried to explain that the bar was the center of the neighborhood in which they had grown up, and the regulars were neighbors first and threats to society second. ... Such explanations were regarded as suspiciously metaphysical by his superiors."

The book's early pages remind me of novels about which some readers complain that the characters do nothing but crack wise. Maybe I'll grow weary of this as I read more, but so far the voice is so distinctive, it has such a knack of making amusing even ordinary remarks not intended as jokes, that I'm happy to go along for the ride. Here's one more example, and then a question:

"Duncan smiled at her. She was a drinker with good looks picking up speed downhill, which was his usual game, but she was Pete's woman."

Neither of these two passages includes physical description of Woodrell's fictional city of St. Bruno, but each gives a brief, sharp sense of the novel's human setting. And now, the question: Physical description is one way authors create a sense of place. What are some others?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011