Daniel Woodrell fan
Recently, I've really been enjoying Daniel Woodrell. His short, sharp and gritty fiction has been quietly simmering away for the better part of two decades. Woodrell's profile was raised markedly with the publication of Winter's Bone, his most well known work; which was adapted into a film in 2010.
Recently, I've really been enjoying Daniel Woodrell. His short, sharp and gritty fiction has been quietly simmering away for the better part of two decades. Woodrell's profile was raised markedly with the publication of Winter's Bone, his most well known work; which was adapted into a film in 2010.
Woodrell's stories all
share hard-worn protagonists who take it upon themselves to right the
injustices heaped upon them. The Death of Sweet Mister and Winter's
Bone twist into harshly redemptive narratives which come across in
starkly different ways. Winter's Bone takes the shape of a mystery,
telling the story of Ree Dolly, a sixteen year old from desolate
Ozark region of Arkansas who is shouldering the the weight of her
entire family: her near-catatonic and incomprehensible mother and two
younger brothers on the cusp of an adulthood. Ree's father has gone
missing, ostensibly because of drug debts, and for Ree to challenge
his disappearance is to come up against a wall of family and blood
ties which hold the Ozarks together. In the Death of Sweet Mister,
Shug Akins is a 13 year old boy who has already seen too much for his
years, living a precarious and troubled existence between the
affections of his perpetually drunk mother and the abuse of his
step-father. What unfolds is inevitable: This is a beautiful and
heartbreaking story of innocence already in the process of being
lost.
Woodrell's most recent,
The Maid's Version, sweeps the reader through generations of
familial history. In its 160 odd pages Woodrell manages to pack the
history West Table, Missouri into a brief and glittering novella
complete with the scandals, grievances and infidelities that
surround and an explosion at a dance-hall in the 1920's. Woodrell deftly
switches decades and characters throughout the book, illustrating the
ways that the tragedy haunts the town for generations. Woodrell's
classic motifs return here, but in a more expansive fashion. While
his earlier novels are unforgiving, rough-spun and immediate, The
Maid's Version is more narratively thematically ambitious,
illustrating an entire community's relationship to itself.
What really comes
through in Woodrell's work is his his intensely unique language, born
of a suspicious and wizened hardship which ties together the places and
people of his stories. He mixes vernacular and a kind of loose,
shimmering third-person-esque description in an incredibly strange blend
that I've never quite come across before. If you've enjoyed Cormac
McCarthy or Donald Ray Pollock, You'll definitely love his novels.
The Death of Sweet Mister (2001)
Winter's Bone (2006)
The Maid's Version (2013)
