Pulp Fiction discussion

Sinister brooding, looming in the winds of change, can be as imprisoning in country noir as that in the classic pulp crime novels of Thompson, Highsmith, McCoy, Goodis, Woolrich, Peter Rabe, or Dorothy B. Hughes. Their stories can be claustrophobic, like a locked hideout or dark room where the protagonists struggle furtively to work out self-defeating obligations. Kafka describes cages going in search of birds. That is the fate of so many of these classic pulp writers’ protagonists, and equally of young rural couples coping with the effects of globalization.

The art of avoiding cages,has much to do with contemporary rural noir. In _Give Us a Kiss_, Daniel Woodrell’s Missouri-born narrator, Doyle, tells of a confederate general who, after the Civil War, took a band to Mexico in hopes of establishing a “new empire of Southerness.” It was quixotic to the max, but “anything was preferable to the humiliation of surrender.”

Doyle is a successful writer long gone from home, and thus “narrowed down” or “citified” by Kansas City and university study. But has a doppelganger he names Imaru, a ghost (so he fancies) from a former life, whose temptations are sometimes heeded, as when Doyle starts fistfights as persistently punishing to opponents as those of his boxer grandfather, Panda. They cost him university grants and teaching jobs. He finds his outlaw brother’s fast-cash scheme and girl friend’s nubile daughter too dangerous and sexy to resist. Another territory may be in the offing, but no barred windows will stop this guy for long. He is the hero of _Give Us a Kiss_ [just do it], isn’t he? Not for nothing was Doyle’s father named after that no-surrender general. His own namesake is one of those family ancestors who died young and violently. His memorial is a photo displayed in Panda’s house along with other kinfolk. This is done in the same way an aristocrat’s forebears would be displayed, but in expensive frames, in a plantation mansion.

The novel’s open-ended complexity is in itself a way of avoiding self-limited cages; saying yes to life.

I have had this on my waiting list for a couple of years. Thanks for reminding me I really like Woodrell's writing.

It's published by Back Bay Books, so there must be a lot of copies around.