I really didn’t like James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, so this review is going to be a lot briefer than usual. Frank Chambers is a drifter who one day finds himself on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He wanders into the Twin Oaks Tavern, owned by Nick Papadakis, and takes a job. Intense attraction sparks between Frank and Nick’s wife, Cora, and they plot to kill Nick so they can be together, succeeding only on their second attempt. The police suspect them of wrongdoing and reveal that Nick had taken out a hefty life insurance plan after the first attempt on his life, and assume that the payout due was the pair’s motivation. In the clear after some knotty legal finagling, they decide to start their new life together but, c’mon, do you really expect a happy ending here?

“Then he came along. I took him, and so help me, I meant to stick by him. But I can’t stand it any more. God, do I look like a little white bird?”
“To me, you look more like a hell cat.”

The Postman Always Rings Twice is told in a sparse, dialogue driven prose with a quick and sharp rhythm. No time is wasted on motivation or detail, Frank’s desire and reasoning goes largely unexplained. The relationship between Frank and Cora lacks the passion to make their crimes seem convincing. If Cora was too delicate to hurt Nick’s feelings by leaving him, how does that morph into murderous intent? The pedestrian, dispassionate prose makes these characters difficult to comprehend. Where in The Maltese Falcon Hammett’s crime story was written in the stylish prose that defined the hardboiled genre, Cain’s lacks excitement, character or dense plot. Very disappointing.

Originally published in a serialized form in the late 1920s, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon was a highly influential precursor to the tremendously popular hardboiled fiction. It remains an exciting read with a detached, morally ambiguous detective and all the key elements of a noir mystery to be expected of the genre, but lacks the significant substance to make it truly remarkable.

When his partner is shot while on a stakeout for a new client, detective Sam Spade is drawn into a seedy world of bumbling policemen, beautiful and dangerous women, and treasure hunting criminals – all of them seeking the priceless ornament, the Maltese Falcon. The plot, circuitous as it is, is the supporting player to the noir style that Hammett is renowned for. Like with Chandler’s The Big Sleep, even if the reader becomess lost in the twists and double-crossings it doesn’t pose much of an issue. None of the characters ever seem to really know what is truth, who to believe or what is happening. Hammett is careful to never reveal the inner thoughts of those around Spade, we can only trust Spade’s professional intuition, his simmering violence and distrust of everything.

The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second ‘you.’
‘People lose teeth talking like that.’ Spade’s voice was still amiable though his face had become wooden. ‘If you want to hang around you’ll be polite.’
The boy repeated his two words.

Sam Spade is such a great character, described as “a blond Satan”, his motives are always ambiguous, even in the end, but he is just so effortlessly cool. He knows who to call, when to call, he knows the tricks to get the information he needs. Most importantly, he knows to trust no one. Not even the timid yet beautiful Brigid O’Shaughnessy that seeks his help. Of course, their relationship isn’t strictly business, and there are some tantalizing fade-to-black sex scenes, the saucier details ignored in favour of keeping the plot moving. Even if, at times, it feels like much of the plot involves the characters sitting in offices and apartments, smoking during lengthy discussions.

He shut his eyes and smiled complacently at an inner thought. He opened his eyes and said:  ‘That was seventeen years ago. Well, sir, it took me seventeen years to locate that bird, but I did it. I wanted it, and I’m not a man that’s easily discouraged when he wants something.’ His smile grew broad. ‘I wanted it and I found it. I want it and I’m going to have it.’

It would be impossible for me to review this book without mentioning the iconic film version, the 1941 film directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart – the first major film noir. Reading Joel Cairo’s affected dialogue in the Maltese Falcon, it is impossible to not hear Peter Lorre speaking them, or to picture anyone but Sydney Greenstreet as Casper Gutman. Much of the dialogue was lifted straight from the novel for the screenplay, and it must be one of the more faithful novel-to-film adaptations.

Yet, for all its seedy hardboiled style, whipsmart protagonists, crackling dialogue and swift plotting, I can’t help but feel that The Maltese Falcon is, well, empty. Not quite the fraud the characters in the novel so desperately devote themselves to, but similarly not worth as much as we’re led to believe. A successful innovator of the style, and a cleverly plotted thriller but lacking anything beyond that to really give it any weight. It just does not have the psychological depth to push it beyond being a captivating story. Perhaps this can be attributed to the lack of insight into any of the characters, we are blind to their motives – and pure greed seems too simple an answer – and their futile and ruthless search for something which may not even exist isn’t explored in any great depth. Style is the clear winner in The Maltese Falcon, and Dashiell Hammett is a skilled master of the genre.

After the experience of reading Nathanael West‘s previous three novels, I went into The Day of the Locust anticipating the awful things he would put his characters through; however, in The Day of the Locust West carefully and slowly reveals the sordid nature of his somewhat archetypal characters. It is an undeniably Los Angeles novel, with a cast of characters featuring set designers, producers, actresses, stage mothers and a gambling midget, but shatters the illusion of a glittering, glamourous Hollywood.

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the monstrous.

Tod Hackett has been in Hollywood for three months to work in set and costume design for the movies. He dreams of becoming a “serious” painter, and even as he is drawn into the world of his commercial art, he still finds inspiration in the landscapes and people of California. It’s a place that is defined by an eclectic mix of styles – of clothing, of architecture – that seem to be always out of place, never quite right for the environment and it comes across as almost grotesque. Tod is presented, at first, as the typical everyman character – a little bland, but not unlikable – but his visions, behaviour and thoughts take a disturbing and unsettling turn as the woman he desires, struggling actress Faye Greener, becomes more involved with another man, Homer Simpson. His behaviour seems to be solely driven by his need to get as close as he can to Faye, including taking care of her ailing vaudevillian father Harry, and going along with her on her dates with other men.

Harry groaned again, modulating from pain to exhaustion, then closed his eyes. Tod saw how skilfully he got the maximum effect out of his agonized profile by using the pillow to set it off. He also noticed that Harry, like many actors, had very little back or top to his head. It was almost all face, like a mask, with deep furrows between the eyes, across the forehead and on either side of the nose and mouth, plowed there by years of broad grinning and heavy frowning. Because of them, he could never express anything either subtly or exactly. They wouldn’t permit degrees of feeling, only the furthest degree.

Homer Simpson is equally strange – Tod catches him outside their apartment building one evening staring up at Faye’s window and he has a mechanical, detached way of living. His relationship with Faye, especially after the death of her father, is categorized by the two of them as a convenient business arrangement. In other words, Homer has money and Faye thinks she needs money in order to become a star. Their relationship gradually deteriorates, they act out before the relationship is actually ended, Faye becomes more malicious, Homer tries to make things up by being more generous. Faye disappears after a fight between a number of men over her, and Homer and Tod are left to fight for themselves in a brutal crush at a movie premiere.

All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?
Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash.
Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

It really is a strange little novel, I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it. Obviously it’s a comment on the illusions offered by entertainment, but also by our own desires and needs, and how badly we react when we realize these illusions are false. The transformation of the characters is extreme, seemingly motivated by the invisible dark force of disillusionment. They’ve all come to Hollywood to find something, someone, achieve a dream, only to find their search fruitless and their dreams destroyed. Faye turns from the coquettish ingenue to master manipulator of men. Tod changes from a dreamy artist to a man who vividly fantasizes about raping Faye. Homer, too, changes from a quiet, meek man to being capable of committing an unforgettable act of violence in the final riot. Deeply unsettling.

Francis Phelan is on the bum. In 1938, in Albany, New York, he wanders from place to place seeking nourishment and appeasement for the heavy guilts that plague him. The novel takes its title from the ironweed plant; a tough, resilient wildflower which significantly resembles the necessary mental and physical strength drawn upon by the desperately impoverished characters of William Kennedy’s Ironweed. Francis is perpetually on the run from his outbursts of lethal violence, running from family responsibilities and work and always toward drink. He returns to Albany, with his lady friend Helen and attempts to reconcile himself with his actions of the past.

Bodies in alleys, bodies in gutters, bodies anywhere, were part of his eternal landscape: a physical litany of the dead.

While working in a cemetery to cover outstanding law debts, Francis Phelan comes across his son’s grave – a son who at the age of 13 days, Francis accidentally dropped and killed. The cemetery is populated with the dead; not only in their graves but as lucid figures surrounding Francis. Gerald, his son, takes on a godlike presence in this world of the dead. Outside of the cemetery, these dead characters continue to figure prominently around Francis, he sees them, he speaks to them, he reflects on their demise and their lives, and his part in them. It is possible that these conversations and memories of the dearly departed are the rampant imagination and senseless rambling of a drunk, or the spectres of mental illness, or more likely, simply a literary device for the past and guilt. Nonetheless, these ghosts play such an integral role as Francis comes to terms with his often violent past.

Only the light had changed, brighter now, and with it grew Francis’s hatred of all fantasy, all insubstantiality. I am sick of you all, was his thought. I am sick of imagining what you became, what I might have become if I’d lived among you. I am sick of your melancholy histories, your sentimental pieties, you goddamned unchanging faces. I’d rather be dyin’ in the weeds than standin’ here lookin’ at you pinin’ away, like the dyin’ Jesus pinin’ for an end to it when he knew every stinkin’ thing that was gonna happen not only to himself but to everybody around him, and to all those that wasn’t even born yet. You ain’t nothin’ more than a photograph, you goddamn spooks. You ain’t real and I ain’t gonna be at your beck and call no more.
You’re all dead, and if you ain’t, you oughta be.
I’m the one is livin’. I’m the one puts you on the map.

The living characters equally occupy a hinterland between life and death. Life on the streets means existing inbetween human and animal nature. For the most part, the dead are more alive and influential than the living; the living and their dreams just as dead as those in buried in the ground. Take Oscar, an old bartender friend of Francis’:

And further, the attention that the bums, the swells, the waiters, were giving the man, proved that this drunk was not dead, not dying, but living an epilogue to a notable life. And yet, and yet … here he was, disguised behind a mustache, another cripple, his ancient, weary eyes revealing to Francis the scars of a blood brother, a man for whom life had been a promise unkept in spite of great success, a promise now and forever unkeepable. The man was singing a song that had grown old not from time but from wear. The song is frayed. The song is worn out.

Or Helen, constantly caught in a state between sleep and waking, until she too joins the legion of the dead:

What for weeks she had achieved in her time of rest was only an illustrated wakefulness that hovered at the edge of dream: angels rejoicing, multitudes kneeling before the Lamb, worms all, creating a great butterfly of angelic hair, Helen’s joyous vision.

After drifting back toward the family he abandoned, Francis begins to see himself as something of a warrior. He learns that his guilt is the only thing which is undeniably his, acting as his driving force, a necessity: his way of paying penitence for his mistakes was to avoid facing up to the responsibility of his actions. The ending seems overly sentimental, compared to the grime and desperation of most of the novel. Francis returns to the family, and they accept him with little reluctance, though this ending is not without sadness, as in doing so he loses the beautifully drawn Helen to death and his whimsical companion Rudy to violent thugs. The saccharine ending  jars somewhat with the aimless contemplative meanderings written in lyrical and original prose that came before, but does not completely undermine the powerful language, imagery and characters of Francis’s life lived on the run.

[A film version starring Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep and Tom Waits was released in 1987. The trailer, and the full film are available to watch on YouTube.]

I read The Old Man and the Sea for the first time last year and I was not exactly what you would call an instant Hemingway convert. “JUST THROW THE EFFING FISH BACK!” yelled the heathen literal reader within. However, I am a creature of persistence and so I picked up Ernest Hemingway’s Fiesta or, The Sun Also Rises. While I enjoyed it on the basic narrative level, I also wish it had delved deeper into the emotional complexities of these characters lives and world, rather than just making them seem like drunken animals. The prose is characteristically spare, devoid of all exposition or reflective passages – what happens simply happens.

It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.

Jake Barnes is living in Paris, impotent because of a vague war injury, and very much in love with the engaged Lady Brett Ashley. Jake discovers that Brett has also been having an affair with his friend Robert Cohn, and the tensions build on a trip to Pamplona where Jake, Brett, Robert, Brett’s fiancee Michael and Jake’s friend Bill travel to for the annual bullfighting fiesta. Cohn’s obsession with Brett grows, he cannot bear to be apart from her – frustrating not only Michael, but Jake and Brett as well. When Brett begins an affair with a young bullfighter Pedro Romero, jealousies between the men intensify and they resolve it in the way that men do: with some awkward, drunken fisticuffs. The novel ends in the aftermath of the fiesta, as Brett and Jake explore Madrid and she tells him that the two of them could have been good together. Jake’s great response to this is: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” In a line, summing up the exact pain and beauty of unrequited, impossible love.

It was a good morning, there were high white clouds above the mountains. It hadrained a little in the night and it was fresh and cool on the plateau, and there was a wonderful view. We all felt good and we felt healthy, and I felt quite friendly to Cohn. You could not be upset about anything on a day like that.
That was the last day before the fiesta.

The vagueness surrounding the war and how it has affected these characters is intriguing – what we assume to be a monumental event in their lives is given very little thought or reflection. Somehow, through Jake’s impotency through war injury, and the complete inability for these men to comprehend their situations through anything but violence and possession, Hemingway seems to be suggesting the war has altered the American understanding of masculinity, how men see themselves in relation to the world and to women. The bullfights and the seven day fiesta atmosphere act as a sometimes distracting backdrop to these concerns, but at the same time heightening the particular tensions between the friends. The intensity and bloodiness of the bullfight action disturbingly mirrors the intricacies of human affairs.

Hemingway manages to make the bloody sport – the bullfights, not the affairs – seem a graceful art, and it is here that the writing shows the most compassion and energy. While Hemingway’s sparse style doesn’t instantly appeal to me, after having read The Sun Also Rises and enjoying it on a narrative level, I am now more inclined to pick up another of his novels.

Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust is such a curious novel. At once acerbic social satire and vicious family melodrama, it examines the question of social propriety among the upper echelons of the moneyed classes and yet loses steam in the last third of the novel. For the most part, however, it beautifully illustrates the ultimate cruelties and snide savagery that humans are all too capable of.

‘That’s always the trouble with people when they start walking out. They either think no one knows, or everybody. The truth is that a few people like Polly and Sybil make a point of finding out about everyone’s private life; the rest of us just aren’t interested.’

Waugh begins the novel by introducing us to John Beaver, a hideous young man of little social standing – he’s always being called up at the last moment to fill in empty seats at dinner parties, he’s something of a joke within the moneyed social circle he moves in. Waugh moves on and introduces the Lasts, Lady Brenda and her husband Tony and their precocious child John Andrew, living in the Gothic surrounds of Tony’s familial estate Hetton. Their lifestyle seems to be largely idyllic, they don’t want for anything and Brenda and Tony’s relationship appears to be healthy and thriving, if a little fallen to routine. Into this idyll the unexpected arrival of Beaver has a profound effect on Lady Brenda, whose fascination with him leads her to London and eventually, embarking on a scandalous affair with the younger man. Scandalous not because of the age difference, or because she is already married – these sorts of frivolous affairs are quite common amongst the married set – but because of the disparity between their social positions. Brenda’s desire leads her to taking up a flat in London, apart from Tony, her son and Hetton.

It had been an autumn of very sparse and meagre romance; only the most obvious people had parted or come together, and Brenda was filling a want long felt by those whose simple, vicarious pleasure it was to discuss the subject in bed over the telephone. For them her circumstances shed peculiar glamour; for five years she had been a legendary, almost ghostly name, the imprisoned princess of a fairy story, and now that she had emerged there was more enchantment in the occurrence than in the mere change of habit of any other circumspect wife. Her very choice of partner gave the affair an appropriate touch of fantasy; Beaver, the joke figure they had all known and despised, suddenly caught up to her among the luminous clouds of deity.

Waugh’s writing is careful not to lay the blame on either side of the marriage. Showing the moroseness of both John Andrew and Tony left behind in Hetton, not aware of why Brenda is so taken with London all of a sudden, shifts our sympathies from her boredom and listlessness to their loss. After the tragic death of John Andrew, Brenda feels compelled (or freed) to tell Tony the truth about Beaver and London and that she wants a divorce. Because of her social status and to maintain social propriety – despite the fact that everyone already knew about the affair – Tony’s lawyers go to great lengths to create marital disruptions on his side to allow the divorce to move smoothly. A clandestine weekend with a woman from a club is more comic that it should be given the circumstances. Once the divorce proceedings are underway, suddenly Brenda and company are talking about Tony’s mortifying actions that lead to the necessary divorce, which is a confusing about face. I suppose maintaining the reputation of her good name is more important that anything even close to resembling the truth.

‘I hear Brenda disgraced herself,’ he said.
‘Goodness,’ said Brenda. ‘People do think that young men are easily come by.’

Whereas the social comedy is largely written in sparkling dialogue, but when Tony ventures to avoid all divorce proceedings and familial manipulations by taking an exotic trip overseas the tone significantly changes. Rather than relying on conversations to drive the narrative forward, it takes on a very different, more reflective and descriptive tone once Tony is abroad. Here the novel lost me a bit. Tony’s travels may have been interesting in their own right, but to become so involved in the inner workings of the social circles of the Lasts and then to be torn right out of it had a somewhat jarring effect. Perhaps this is to suggest Tony’s equal removal from society through no real fault of his own?

After such effective portrayal of the petty worries of the London elite, the ending is rather unsatisfying and bleak. Tony is lost in Brazil, captive to an old man who forces him to read Dickens to him every night; Brenda has remarried, not to Beaver, but to another of Tony’s close friends, and Hetton has passed into the hands of Tony’s relatives. Reflecting on it, I suppose that in A Handful of Dust Waugh was trying to show that all humans are capable of great savagery – whether it is discussed discreetly among friends in beautifully decorated drawing rooms or in the remote jungles and clay huts of the tropics.

I picked up Aldous Huxley’s classic Brave New World with knowledge of its dystopian themes, but with no real awareness of its story; vague recollections of soma and babies being created mechanically, but nothing really beyond that. It’s amazing how in a culture in which we are continually spoiled or assumed to have a certain level of knowledge about canonical texts, somehow, basic information about Brave New World had passed me by. Set in the distant future, civilized society has taken technology and the methods of mechanical reproduction to every aspect of human life – the physical birthing process and concept of mothers are abhorred in favour of chemically differentiated humans assigned to castes according to tasks that need to be performed within society, work is performed in exchange for the perfect drug soma, promiscuity and carnality are encouraged, and above all the collective social order is more important than the individual. Within this system, Bernard Marx finds himself feeling “different” but it isn’t until he returns from a savage reservation with the naturally birthed son of Bernard’s Director that the social order can be examined from an outsiders perspective.

‘But people never are alone now,’ said Mustapha Mond. ‘We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it’s almost impossible for them ever to have it.’

Bernard Marx is such a complex character, he is for the most part of the novel the sole voice of protest but he is too afraid to really express it, surrounded as he is by others who have been successfully conditioned to passively accept everything on offer. When John revolts against the impassive acceptance of his mothers death and refusal to see his grief, Bernard just stands back unable to join him. In his heart, and in his thoughts he knows that the methods of distraction are against everything he wants to stand for, but because he is both critical and part of society he just cannot separate himself entirely because it is all he knows. I didn’t wholly understand the point Huxley was driving toward until John (the Savage) meets with the Controller, Mustapha Mond, and Mond discusses the basis of the civilized world to the alienated and confused John. It wasn’t until this point when all everything started fitting together for me, and became truly horrifying – and started to mirror aspects of our own culture as well. The cult of positivity, the fear of solitude, the use of entertainment to dull people. Here’s a graphic which lends the comparison to today a stark relevance, and compares the future as envisioned by Huxley to that of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

‘But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’
‘In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘All right, then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’
There was a long silence.
‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re welcome,’ he said.

I’m still stunned and taken aback by how powerful the final chapters of Huxley’s novel are. Reeling, I suppose one would say. I think my experience of Brave New World is going benefit immensely from multiple rereads, there was so much going on that didn’t become clear to me until the end. I feel completely unable to articulate how deeply it has shaken me. I wonder whether this paralyzing inability to write about Brave New World stems from the power and continuing relevance of its message or from the novels prestigious reputation. It’s the same feeling I had when I was reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter for the first time (yes, I can really tie Carson McCullers into any and every book discussion I have.), the feeling of “yes. Yes. Yes! Someone else gets it.” I’m sure it’s just a matter of synchronicity, simply discovering it at the right time.

(A brief note: I do talk about some details which are essential to the plot, so be aware. This is your official spoiler warning.)

Before beginning to read All the King’s Men, I was under the impression – one of those pesky groundless preconceived notions that so often prove to be wildly incorrect – that it would be a very dry, heavily political novel. Had I done a little research beforehand, I would have discovered that Robert Penn Warren not only won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, but also for his poetry, making him the only person to win the Pulitzer for fiction and poetry. (He was also a Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress.) Enough about the author, basically I approached  All the King’s Men with a misconception about the content and style, and was surprised, even pleased, to find that I was completely wrong.

Jack Burden, a wisecracking journalist, narrates the tale of and his role in the political career of Willie Stark, an idealistic and determined lawyer turned politician, in the early 1930s in the American South. Stark enters his political career primarily because of the corruption of others – an underhanded affair with a local schoolhouse goes fatally wrong which puts him in favour of the voters, he is the pawn in a political game to try and split the vote of another candidate running for Governor. It is this latter event, and the revelation of his role as a pawn, “a sap”, from his assistant/mistress Sadie Burke that sets in motion Stark’s attitude toward politics. Afterward, Stark is not afraid to use the same corrupt, morally questionable techniques in order to succeed. Eventually, he turns to use these on Jack Burden, his press man, who has close familial connections to influential people in the state. Interestingly, Warren presents these events non-chronologically, as Burden reflects back on their relationship together. It is a bit confusing at first, especially because the chapters are so long and it is easy to get lost in the temporal shifts. However, it is a clever stylistic technique, and comes to echo the theme of time, responsibility and retrospective reassessments of the past.

“Yeah,” I said, “I heard the speech. But they don’t give a damn about that. Hell, make ‘em cry, make ‘em laugh, make ‘em think you’re their weak erring pal, or make ‘em think you’re God Almighty. Or make ‘em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ‘em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ‘em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ‘em, and haven’t been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won’t set on their stomachs, and they don’t believe in God, so it’s up to you to give ‘em something to stir ‘em up and make ‘em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they come for. Tell ‘em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake, don’t try to improve their minds.”

It is Willie Stark’s insistence that Burden scrounge around for any dirt on Judge Irwin, a prominent father figure of Jack’s youth and an ally to Stark’s political rival MacMurfee, that the story really springs from. Burden revisits his childhood and adolescence, the people and family members that populated those years and uncovers a hell of a lot more than he ever intended. While it is somewhat questionable, I thought, of Stark to encourage Burden to look into Judge Irwin’s past to find any misdeeds, Burden takes on the role with aplomb. A former student of history, Jack has a keen awareness of the importance of the past, but no real attachment to his own. Burden discovers an incident of bribery and suicide which implicates not only Judge Irwin, but Governor Stanton, the father of Burden’s close friends Anne and Adam Stanton. Unsurprisingly, Stark uses these connections and the knowledge of the event to use Adam and Anne for his own ends as well, making Adam Stanton the head of a new medical centre and taking Anne Stanton, the object of Jack’s affection, for his mistress. To Willie, everything and everyone is a potential political tool.

Feeling betrayed and rejected after finding out about Willie and Anne, Jack heads West, taking a road trip of self discovery, coming out of it with the theory that no one is responsible for anything, instead there is an uncontrollable, involuntary current which guides everything. This seems to be just another way for Burden to diminish his participation when things turn out badly. Burden confronts Judge Irwin about his involvement in the bribery/suicide case, leading to Irwin shooting himself later that night. Jack’s mother reveals that Judge Irwin was Jack’s biological father. Despite the violence that occurs as a result of his actions, Burden takes or seems to show little responsibility toward his part in it, assuaging any guilt by lying about their conversation.

I dismissed the question finally. Perhaps the only answer, I thought then, was that by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it is too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made? At least that was the way I argued the case back then.

The novel ends in a display of bloodshed, Adam discovers the truth about Willie and Anne disrupting his staunchly held belief in the triumph of good and honesty over all else, and shoots Willie; Willie’s over protective driver Sugar Boy shoots Adam. As Jack tries to uncover who set in motion the carnage he comes to accept his responsibility, in part, for what happened. While he shows some awareness of how his actions influenced the actions of others, there still doesn’t seem to be any retribution or repentance for this. He ends with everything he ever wanted, money, the girl, the time to write his monograph on a distant family member and so on. At first, this ending didn’t really have much effect on me, but the night I finished it I woke up during the night and found myself thinking about it, incredibly incensed about how things transpired. Thinking further, it probably just reflects deeper on a comment Willie makes in the novel about how all good is built upon the foundation of corruption.

All the King’s Men is a powerful novel, definitely not the dry political tome I was expecting. Instead it examines the moral responsibility we should take for our actions and the implications and importance of time and hindsight in a detailed and vivid language.

Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road examines the harsh poverty in the daily life of the Lester family. Jeeter Lester is a failed sharecropper whose family are starving and all but two of his seventeen children have abandoned him. Jeeter’s sister, a widowed preacher, arrives and lures his son Dude into marriage.

Jeeter Lester is such a curious character. He is driven by a faith in nature, a faith in God, despite numerous setbacks which he solely accredits to the work of God; but it is a misguided religious faith, almost an excuse for not taking responsibility for his own livelihood. Then there is the faith of preacher Sister Bessie, whose religious devotion does not seem to be any more active that Jeeter’s. Her motivation for marrying Dude is unclear, the marriage doesn’t seem to benefit her – and this is a tale devoid of all love, marriage is a business transaction.

Pearl would not talk. She would not say a word, no matter how persuasive Lov tried to be, nor how angry he was; she even hid from Lov when he came home from the coal chute, and when he found her, she slipped away from his grasp and ran off into the broom-sedge out of sight. Sometimes she would even stay in the broom-sedge all night, remaining out there until Lov went to work the next morning.
Pearl had never talked, for that matter. Not because she could not, but simply because she did not want to.

There is always the undercurrent of suggested violence, especially against women. Lov and his child bride Pearl Lester, all of 12 years old and refuses to speak to or sleep in the same room as him. The position of women in Tobacco Road is perplexing. They are wives who fail, according to their husbands, their duties both around the home and sexually. Ellie May and Sister Bessie are physically deformed: Ellie May with her reparable harelip (which Jeeter keeps talking about how he will take her to get it fixed, but after eighteen years still hasn’t managed to provide for her), Sister Bessie with her absent nose – just two black holes in her face. The male characters continually point out these physical attributes, often claiming that it prevents them from being able to find a man. This continual degradation of the female characters made me feel uncomfortable.

The novel sometimes appears to be repetitive – characters repeat the same action or speak the same words over and over. At first I thought it was lazy writing, reducing the characters to mere simpletons with very little internal, emotional processes; but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that this repetition worked to keep them within the vicious cycle of poverty. Jeeter talks about how all he needs is a mule and cotton seed – at least once each chapter – but he just doesn’t have the motivation or means to actually do it. Talking about it, knowing the way out, but being unable to translate that into action keeps the Lester family in their state. Jeeter prides himself on maintaining tradition, without realizing that it comes at the expense of progress.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio tells of the townfolk of Winesburg, their eccentricities, their frustrations and their desires. All of them share their stories and interact with George Willard, a young reporter for the local newspaper, who acts as a sort of guiding beacon in their lives. Each of the chapters introduces a new character, linked with the others only by their friendship with George Willard, their hometown and their inherent and desperate loneliness; in this way it reminded me of Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Willard acts as a symbol of hope for the possibility of escape from the stifling conditions of Winesburg which have crippled, it seems, a large majority of the townsfolk.

Rather than a sprawling narrative tracing entire lives, instead Anderson chooses the moments in life that make them simultaneously unique and alike: a young mother who neglected her own dreams listens to her son express his own desire for adventure and escape, a minister watches the bare shoulders of a woman from the window of his study, a woman is abandoned by her young lover. There seems to be a distinct schism between who these people are now and who they were in the past, and they attempt to understand what happened to them in the in-between time. Yes, it is the loss of a type of innocence, but it is not quite as explicit or simple as that. It is more than the gap between childhood and adulthood, more of a certain level of consciousness – an awareness and frustration of the limits of experience.

“There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backwards view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. […] With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another. If he prefers that the other be a woman, that is because he believes that a woman will be gentle, that she will understand. He wants, most of all, understanding.”

Denying the idea of an idyllic pastoral small-town America, Anderson creates Winesburg as a microcosmic textured map of the complexity of human desperation. These inarticulate, lonely characters have lives and moments that are heartbreakingly real, their secret thoughts and wishes are artfully expressed through Anderson’s haunting prose, giving voice, and hope, to the voiceless.

(Winesburg, Ohio is also available online to read through Project Gutenberg.)