The Maid’s Version by Daniel Woodrell

I can hear the whining now. It’s the early 1960s. 12yo Alek is being sent to spend some quality summer time with his grandmother Alma in the bustling metropolis of West Table, MO, in an unsympathetic town deep in the Ozarks. Just one boring day after another boring day, each of which began with Alma combing out her hair that reached the ground.  In brief conversations, she reveals much about her life and the town’s turning point that stir  memories that made her cry at night. Lonely and proud, that was Alma.

Alma was born poor and lived poor. Had a free-spirited younger sister Ruby. Alma worked mostly as a maid, picking up after people who had so much more than her, Mr. and Mrs. Glencross mostly. She married young to Buster, who was largely an absent drunk, except on those days when he impregnated Alma. Three sons – James (who died in the WWII Pacific theater), Sidney (died from some childhood blood disease), and John Paul who would become Alek’s father. After cleaning up the dinner plates, Alma would stuff her pockets with the table scraps and take them for her boys.

Mrs. Glencross wasn’t an overly attentive wife, failing in her wifely duties. Mr. Glencross and Ruby hook up and their lustful attraction turns much deeper, but Ruby wants more out of life and tries to break up, sending Glencross into a tearful funk. His wife tells him tears are one thing, just don’t cry in front of their children.

It’s 1929 and there is a big dance planned for the Arbor Dance Hall, which is the 2^nd floor of a building that houses a mechanic’s auto shop. The youth come from everywhere to dance and mingle and look and long . . . right up until a massive explosion rips the building right off its foundation.

42 died that night. The bodies were so scattered and dang near impossible to identify that the coffins no doubt contained mixed remains. In Alma’s sorrows over Ruby, she stopped, prayed, and kissed every coffin at the mass funeral just to make sure she said good bye to Ruby.

The investigation and the two special councils years later had to conclude that it was a horrible accident. But when you are basically invisible at town gatherings, Alma picks up bits and pieces about that night, never quite able to put it all together and mulls it all over for the rest of her life.

Until Alek comes to stay. He learns of the geeky boy in town who hardly ever talked to a girl until an equally awkward girl, just down from Wisconsin, enrolls in high school. They were constantly together, right up to that night in 1929. The only girl in town who could play the piano was cajoled into playing with the band that night and gave her last performance. The mechanic who used to be muscle for a gang in St. Louis, now living under a new identity. The preacher who condemned the heathenistic behavior of those who frequented the dance hall. The gypsies who camped just outside of town. Death, lies, cheating, hidden scandal, Alek heard it all from Alma.

Alek listened and learned, finally taking his dad’s advice to, “Go on and tell it.” Tell the maid’s version of what happened that awful night.

It’s been years since Woodrell’s last book, the spectacular 2006 Winter’s Bone, was published and went on to be one of the great movies of recent years (if you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, I think I’ll be asking for recommendations elsewhere). The haunting prose and marginally formal language of this isolated town will be hard for some to read, but please bear with it, if you be of that type that doesn’t want to work at your reading.

It’s because Woodrell can flat out write. Good Lord, can this guy write. He jumps effortlessly between the depression years and the 60s, from the Ozarks to St. Louis, good times and lean times, from son to son to drunk father to banker to mechanic to musician to . . . you get the idea. I am sure he worked at every page, paragraph, sentence, and word so you better be prepared to do the same. And if you do, you will have been treated to one of the very best American novelists currently rewarding us with his considerable skills. And what is probably most impressive of all is that Woodrell paints this intense, dreadful, and intricately woven panorama in a compact 164 pages.

How in the hell can one say so much about hardscrabble life and survival, death and terror and loss in so few words? Gotta have Woodrell’s touch. Think I’ll join MRB friend Charlie Stella and drink the Woodrell kool-aid. I won’t even belittle this with one of our usual ‘power rotation’ comments. Let’s just say that for me, The Maid’s Version, Ordinary Grace, and Boy’s Life stand as the best novels I’ve read in this, or most any, year.

ECD

The Outlaw Album: Stories

East Coast Don has already written two favorable reviews on books by Woodrell, recommended by friend-of-MRB Charlie Stella. Woodrell has written eight novels which are mostly crime books based in the Missouri Ozarks in a style Woodrell calls “country noir.” I typically don’t like short story collections, but that what this one is. I’ll echo ECD’s remark that the writing is powerful, especially the dialogue that captures life in the Ozarks. “Noir” is the right word since “dark” would hardly capture the nature of his writing. The characters are disturbing and real. I’m intrigued enough that I’ll soon dive back into a Woodrell novel, perhaps Winter’s Bone which was already reviewed by ECD, a 2006 novel which was adapted into a movie in 2010 that got four Academy Award nominations including best picture, or maybe his second novel from 1987, Woe to Live On, which was adapted to a film in 1999, Ride with the Devil.

The Death of Sweet Mister by Daniel Woodrell

Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone was about a dirt poor family set deep in the Ozarks. So is Sweet Mister. But don’t even think Woodrell is revisiting familiar ground. Same zip code maybe, but entirely different themes.

Red and Glenda Akins have one really screwed up marriage. Red is a twice-burned petty criminal with a chip on his shoulder. He and Glenda married way too young and Glenda was no where near ready to be a wife. She partied a bit and whether Red or just this guy was the father of her son is sort of obscure. The son, who goes by Shuggie, is a fat, 13 year old kid with a double chin (Glenda says it makes him look “prosperous.” Shug says, when you’re a teenager, you are just fat). Shug, Glenda’s Sweet Mister, is just beginning to notice girls, especially Glenda in the way she dresses “none too motherly,” carries herself, flirts with most any guy, drinks, smokes, and talks. Together, Glenda and Shug live in a broken down cabin doing caretaker work on the neighboring cemetery, doing their damn best to keep Red from blowing his stack and taking out his anger mostly on Glenda. Shug tries to protect her, but he doesn't quite seem to be cut from the same gene pool, physically or emotionally, as Red.

Basil is Red’s running bud and both are “a bubble off plumb.” They go for weeks at a time “scallybippin” anything they think has some value – cigarettes, clothes, TVs, toasters, you name it. They will also haul Shug along for “man stuff,” forcing Shug to break into homes of really sick folks who have been prescribed serious pain meds.

As dumb luck would have it, Glenda and Shug are out for a walk and meet up a guy dipping his feet in the creek next to where he parked his T-bird. Casual conversation. That’s all. But he sure seemed nice. A cook at a local eatery following the cook smoke wherever it took him.

Over and over, Red’s return is the prelude to a beating – on Glenda, Shug, or both. Shug tenderly nurses his mom’s wounds and they return to whatever normalcy follows. And the guy with the T-bird. That T-bird. A chat turns to a smoke and a drink to a dinner, to repeated visits to the cabin by the cemetery to far more. Of course, when Red finds out, he takes it all out on Glenda.

But this time, Glenda and her T-bird man fight back and Basil is forced to find out why Red has disappeared without him knowing anything. If Glenda and Shug stay, they will eventually face the wrath of Basil. The cook has a line on a job in New Orleans and wants Glenda and Shug to move there with him. Shug ain’t happy and shows proof to Basil of Red’s fate. The New Orleans job falls through, but a job on a Miami-based cruise ship pops up, so Glenda starts packing and makes arrangements for Shug to live with his grandmother.

But the cook never shows. Leaving Shug to comfort his mother’s loss in ways no boy should ever have to do.

Many thanks to MRB friend Charlie Stella for his original recommendation of Winter’s Bone (and if you haven’t seen the movie, you don’t know what you are missing. Watch the ‘Making of” segment for some really eye-opening casting). I went back to Woodrell for no particular reason and this was a good treatment for one still a bit burnt out by Tom Clancy’s latest monster. This little tale packs a ton of emotion into less than 200 pages of a 6x9 inch layout.

As Red’s anger with Glenda grows, I was expecting Shug to pay the ultimate price, but in the end, that price is the end of his innocence that leads to a mother-son relationship that, according to Shug, “everyone does.” I would hardly call this uplifting. Downright depressing is more like it.

But my word, can Woodrell write. Yeah, this may be a more modern play on some Shakespeare theme, and according to some reviews Woodrell is compared to Faulkner (almost embarrassed to admit that I’ve never read anything by Faulkner, but may have to now). But, boys and girls, for lights out story telling, Woodrell is damn hard to beat. I’ll be venturing back to the Ozarks again real soon.

East Coast Don

Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell

This is the second book recommended by our friend Charlie Stella. While Eddie Coyle was another tale of New York crime, this is far removed to the backwoods of the Ozark Mountains.

Winter is creeping up on the Ozarks. Ree Dolly is a 16yo girl thrust too early in to the role of provider and caretaker of her family. Her father, Jessup, is a backwoodsman known for his ability to cook up crystal meth. Problem is he put up his house as collateral that he would show for his next court date and things are not looking good that he will show. The local law tells Ree if her father doesn’t show that she, her two younger brothers, and her mom (who has mentally retreated inside herself and is incapable of caring for anyone) will be tossed out.

What transpires is Ree’s attempt to find her father. This far back in the hills has its own culture, laws, and morality where family matters above all and each family have its own clan based on what side of which creek between what hills someone lives. Ree endures countless rebuffs, insults, and assaults as she tries to find her father culminating in a viscous beating at the hands and feet of 3 women of a rival clan. The question is not just where is Jessup, but is he even alive and if he isn’t alive, what was behind his death and where are his remains. What begins as a tale of struggle of various clans buried far beneath the world we live morphs into a morality tale about sacrifice in the face on unyielding odds.

Mr. Stella’s books and recommendations are based on dialogue and characters. This one is a drastic change from the city dialogue drawn out by Stella, Higgins, Price, Pelecanos, et al. The mountain language is a barely distinguishable dialect and takes some time to get used to the flow that eventually becomes a character almost unto itself. Ree is one tough young woman who has grown up too early, and not by her own choosing. This is quite different from what we usually post here, but Woodrell’s depiction of a foreign life even on our own shores is a venture worth taking.

East Coast Don