Huck in the Ozarks

So much contemporary fiction is artsy without being artful, heavy with plot but light on attention to character. A narrative indifferent to people is, at best, a parlor game, an airless room or a screed. For evidence see the review I linked to on Sunday. I don’t have a theory to explain this, though the ascension of “creative writing” probably contributes to the scarcity of good fiction – too many people with a will to write and a minor gift for mimicry but nothing to say.

I’m pleased to have stumbled upon an exception, Daniel Woodrell, who in his seventh novel, The Death of Sweet Mister, published in 2001, has much to say about his corner of the Ozarks. Woodrell narrowly skirts the trap of white-trash cliché, the trailer-park/meth lab/incest culture of movies and bad jokes, but two qualities redeem his vision – language and an ability to create engagingly unlikely characters. In this novel, the qualities are twinned in the narrator, Shug Akins, a fat 13-year-old who lives with his mother and jailbird stepfather and tries to make sense of the savagery and crime accepted as a way of life in his debased culture. Red, the stepfather, is on parole and uses Shug, Fagin-fashion, to burglarize houses and businesses for dope and anything he can fence. Here’s Shug describing a typical night with Red and his halfwit friend Basil:

“Red had beat his guitar since midnight. Red and Basil had got happy on some kind of dope in the kitchen. They did get happy and the guitar did get beat and parts of songs flew from it. They each smoked cigarettes and burned enough cigarettes to send smoke signals from the kitchen. Their happy had run wild all night and they had not begun yet to fizzle towards bed. By the sun it had turned breakfast time but on their clocks run by dope they seemed to be at another hour, another hour around early night when fun stuff had just got started. The kind of happy they had got was the kind that would get loose and would slop about into the way of everybody else.”

Shug’s voice owes something to Faulkner and, ultimately, to his fellow-Missourian, Mark Twain. It’s a carefully modulated voice, combining innocence, savvy and humor. I like Shug and want him to prevail, though that seems unlikely. I read half the novel in one setting Saturday night, and can already see Woodrell working out the implications of his title, for Shug’s mother calls him “sweet mister.” It’s a matter of waiting to see what species of hell awaits Shug, who apparently survives to tell his story. For an added dash of Southern Gothic, Shug and his family live in a hovel in the middle of a cemetery. Shug’s job is to mow the grass:

“The cemetery offered more than one look, more than one feel. The tombstones came in a variety of ways. The oldest needed to be read with fingers, the words and numbers had been blown off by the years and the stuff years throw at a thing, so the names were only a letter here and a letter there, though the rock still stood. In the newer parts the tombstones tended to shine and stand clean and easy to read as a stop sign. There were lots of names hammered into those tombstones of all ages that had the same names as many of the streets of town that I would walk on when I went around. Same names as streets and stores and car lots and grade schools. I shaved the fuzz from the entire dead, one and all, if I ever had heard of them, or never had, I gave the same shave to each.”

How long since you read intimations of mortality, a hymn to the democracy of death, in prose so rich and unlikely?