Ree Dolly is an older-than-her-years sixteen-year-old who lives in the Missouri Ozarks. Saddled with the responsibility of taking care of her two younger brothers and her mentally ill mother, Ree’s problems grow worse when her father, who is charged with operating a crystal meth lab, disappears after having put up the family home as security for his bail. If Ree can’t find him and persuade him to show up in court, she and her mother and brothers will be forced out of their house. Unfortunately, all of Ree’s large extended family are criminals of one sort or another, and they don’t want her to find out what really happened to her father.
This is a book that’s gotten a lot of good press, and deservedly so. Because of its Ozark setting and teenage girl protagonist, some critics have compared it to Charles Portis’s TRUE GRIT. To me it seems more like an updated version of a backwoods novel by Harry Whittington or Charles Williams, to name just two authors who often mined the same bleak vein of rural poverty and desperation and lawlessness that Woodrell makes use of in this novel. It took me a while to settle in to Woodrell’s style, but once I did I found myself racing right through the story. Occasionally funny, often horrific, and always well-written and suspenseful, this is a fine book. I liked it considerably more than the only other Woodrell novel I’ve read, TOMATO RED.
1 comment:
I really liked Woodrell's GIVE US A KISS. It's *country noir*. Or at least that's what it says on the cover.
I love backwood's stuff. Old or new. James Ross's THEY DON'T DANCE MUCH is probably the best example I've read. Though I also really like DIAMOND BIKINI.
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