FFB:BLACK FRIDAY, David Goodis

 

(from the archives of Ed Gorman)

Forgotten Books: Black Friday by David Goodis

"In fact, the craftsmanship (David Goodis) mastered in all those years of turning out fiction for the pulps was sometimes all that salvaged his books from a morass of aberrant psychology and obsession." --James Sallis

Black Friday is proof absolute of Sallis' comment. It's a crime novel only by default. Here we have the typical Goodis loser loner protagonist, this time named Hart who is on the run from a murder charge. Through a cosmic coincidence he is taken in by a murderous big time burglar named Charley. And his gang.

The story arc deals with a pending huge burglary of fine art and jewelry that Hart will be allowed to join in if he can prove to Charley that he is a "professional"--i.e. a man who never kills for passion but only for money. Loopy at this measure is Goodis makes it go.

But please don't confuse this heist with the book's real import. I remember reading a lot of August Strindberg in my college days as a wanna-be playwright. Goodis has pulled a Strindberg. What a feckless loveless hopeless cast of oddballs and freaks he offers us.

The gang doesn't like Hart so we have scenes of frequent intimidation except for the gangster who starts to like Hart because Hart finds the man's artistic skills impressive (or claims he does), Then there's Freida the obese sad crazed dangerous vamp of Goodisworld. Repellent as he finds her he has to sleep with her because she needs the kind of sex her man Charley can't deliver. He's impotent most of the time. Hart is using her--he literally grimaces when he touches her--but she falls in love with him and Charley figures it out. Charley is not happy.

Then there's Myrna the forlorn faded woman whose brother Paul Hart killed because he seemingly had no choice. She despises Hart at first but eventually they come together. The interplay of all these relationships accounts for seventy-five, maybe eighty per cent of the novel. I couldn't stop flipping the pages though several times I wanted to. This is the only book I've ever read that makes Orwell's Down and Out In Paris and London read like a B'way musical. It's past grim. It's a violent ward of wanton treachery and despair.

It's as close to Grand Guignol as crime fiction gets.

Short Story Wednesday: "Pig Labs" Will Mackin (THE NEW YORKER)

 Although this story seems surreal, it is probably an accurate account of how soldiers going off to Iraq and Afghanistan as medics were trained to deal with battlefield injuries by practicing on pigs. Of course, attachment takes place making the ordeal even harder. Many of the men are in redeployment and have battle scars and trauma themself.

At the same time, our protagonist is dealing with a wife traumatized by childhood abuse as she's about to have a baby.

 Jerry House

Monday, Monday

 

I have read every Strout book and enjoyed them all. This is one of the best. A new character and setting. She is harder on the women than men, I think

Now I am reading THE ENDING WRITES ITSELF by Evelyn Clarke.

A rainy day here, what do people that don't read to on days like this?

Watching THE HOUSE OF SPIRITS (Prime) PARADISE (Hulu)

Rewatched BODY HEAT. Movies are not this sexy any more.  

How about you? 

Happy Fourth of July from Detroit

 

Short Story Wednesday: "How Old, How Young", John O'Hara

I have always thought I read a lot of John O'Hara as a kid until I looked at his list of publications. I may have only read FROM THE TERRACE, or was reading it when my father pitched it out the door. This action necessitated a late night retrieval because it was a library book. And I really can't believe my father had any idea about who O'Hara was or what the book was about. Maybe the cover scared him.

At any rate, I think I mostly read O'Hara short stories He published hundreds of them. But I did read a lot of novels by three other Johns as a teen: Steinbeck, Marquand and Dos Passos. As well as Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe, Willa Cather, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen and Theodore Dreiser. No mysteries at all. I don't think I knew they existed then.  My mother had a few in our one tiny bookcase, but I was more attracted to the romances there.

Anyway this story is collected in the Library of America collection of a few years ago. It is a nine-page story. O'Hara wrote both very short and very long stories. It begins with a young man (Jamie) noticing a young woman crying in the street. He recognizes her and has a immediate desire to cover her up because her deep distress is like nakedness to him. People didn't often cry in the streets. 

He looks for her at a swimming party that night (this is probably set in Gibbsville- a stand in for O'Hara's own hometown in PA) Nancy has begged off coming; she was supposed to bring 12 ears of corn, someone complains. A discussion takes place over how girls mature earlier than boys. How he shouldn't fall for her since although the same age, he was too immature for Nancy. "She needs someone who can take care of her," someone says.

But he looks for her again the next day at the club swimming pool and finds her. He is very attracted to her and watches as she climbs out of the pool to see where the swimsuit sticks to her body. (I had never thought of this as a "thing" before). The dialog between them is snappy. 

She has been crying because her father has been charged with misappropriation of funds and she asks him if he assumed she was crying because she was pregnant. 

Again there are references as to how he is not mature enough for her. He offers to marry her and she says he isn't even finished with college. The story ends with the lines. 

"I don't want to have to wait that long," he said.

"We don't have to wait, for everything," she said. 

Although only nine pages, you come away from the story feeling you know a lot about these two twenty-one year olds.  They come from the privileged class and I think that was the typical group O'Hara wrote about. He came from that class  (father was a doctor) although he always felt like an outsider apparently because he was Irish and Catholic. There are lots of phrases in the story that date it, but the story isn't dated at all. Something very like it is in The New Yorker most weeks. 

 

Cullen Gallagher 

George Kelley 

Monday, Monday

 Supposed to be 100 degrees here on Tuesday. It must have reached that before but I don't remember it. 

Saw TOY STORY 5 and enjoyed but did not love it. Seems like the are using story lines from earlier films in the series and it is also a lot like INSIDE OUT. 

Reading YESTERYEAR by Caro Claire Burke, which is very funny and original.

Watching, MY FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS, THE BEAR, PORTRAIT ARTIST OF THE YEAR, SUGAR.

Megan is in Hollywood, serving as the consulting producer for a new Netflix show called NEXT DOOR. She will be back and forth from LA To New York for five months. She just finished her next book so it came up at the right time.  

What's new in your backyard?