THE BLONDE ON THE STREET CORNER, David Goodis (Mike Dennis)
"Ralph stood on the corner, leaning against the brick wall of Silver's candy
store, telling himself to go home and get some sleep."
That's the opening line of The Blonde On The Street Corner,
a 1954 novel written by David Goodis. Of course, Ralph doesn't go home.
Instead, he spots a blonde across the dark street and gawks at her. She
eventually calls him over to light her cigarette, which he does.
Now,
at this point, one might expect that Ralph would be irresistibly lured
into a tight web spun by this dazzling femme fatale, resulting in his
eventual moral destruction, if not death. But Goodis doesn't write that
way. In fact, the blonde is fat, sharp-tongued, and lives in the
neighborhood. Ralph knows her, and knows that she's married. She
propositions him right on the corner, but he rejects her. "I don't mess
around with married women," he tells her. Then he goes home.
Much
to the reader's surprise, this encounter does not trigger the plot of
the novel. In fact, it would be right to say that the novel has no plot,
in the usual sense. Ralph returns to his impoverished Philadelphia
home, where he lives with his parents, and spends the rest of the book
wallowing in misery with his friends, all of whom are in the same boat
as he: in their thirties, usually unemployed, and filled with
unrealistic dreams. One of his friends says he is a "songwriter", but no
one has ever recorded any of his songs. Another wants to be a
big-league baseball player, but lasted only a week on a class D minor
league team. They spend most of their time leaning up against buildings,
wearing only thin coats against the bitter Philadelphia winter, and
wishing they had more money. They talk a good deal about going to
Florida, where they can get jobs as bellmen in a "big-time hotel",
convinced this would jump-start their desperate lives.
The
book goes on like this pretty much all the way through, with no moving
story line, but it's Goodis' prose that keeps you riveted to the page.
No one can paint a picture of a hopeless world better than he can. For
Goodis, Philadelphia is a desolate place, whose bleak streets offer
little in the way of promise. Many of his novels were set there, and
they all shared that common trait. Life in that city is, for him and his
characters, usually an exercise in futility. These are people who walk
around with twenty or thirty cents in their pockets, who cold-call girls
out of the phone book asking for dates, and for whom escape to Florida
is always right around the corner. The finale provides the mortal body
blow to Ralph, stripping him of the last shred of his dignity.
The Blonde On The Street Corner is
a potent novel, filled with the passions and despair of its characters.
All through this book, you find yourself longing to run into characters
whose lives mean something. Then, you realize there aren't any.
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