THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 31, 1996 TAG: 9603280572
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY EUGENE M. MCAVOY
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
GIVE US A KISS
A Country Noir
DANIEL WOODRELL
Henry Holt. 237 pp. $22.50.
On the plains and plateaus of the central United States, in the hills and hollows of the Ozark Mountains, few things are so important as the fresh-furrowed soil, a pineshadowed sunset and an amber whiskey over ice. Still, nothing is so important as family.
This theme has dominated the literature of mid-America since John Steinbeck first introduced the nation to Okies in 1939. Not since Steinbeck, however, has a writer captured the area's language, culture and heart as well as Daniel Woodrell in Give Us A Kiss. Avoiding the Dogpatch comedy that has long defined the region, Woodrell skillfully blends mountain lore, humor and history into a voice as dark and clear as the wooded lakes for which the Ozarks are famous.
At its simplest, Woodrell's fifth novel is the story of Doyle Redmond's flight from indignity to damnation, from the frying pan into the fire. Disenchanted with the falsity of academia and a poet-professor wife sleeping her way to publication, Doyle flees his mediocre writing career and middle-class life. With no particular destination in mind and guided by Imaru, the voice of his past lives, he steals his wife's used Volvo and heads east. In Kansas City, his misplaced-hillbilly parents lend purpose to his flight, and Doyle returns to the red and rugged hills of the Ozarks. His purpose: to convince his older brother to surrender to the police for a string of petty crimes.
His brother Smoke offers a better, though less lawful, plan. Out of boredom and sibling devotion, Doyle conspires with Smoke to finance his sabbatical through the sale of some home-grown Razorback Red. As expected, while he waits for the plot and ``wacky-weed'' to mature, Doyle's life turns south.
The 30-something Doyle falls in love with the 19-year-old virgin, witch-in-training and wanna-be actress Niagra. He kills Bunk Dolly and reignites a long-standing feud with the Redmonds' blood-sworn enemies. His boredom finally assuaged, Doyle experiences the excitement his middle-class existence lacked. He lives ``the night, that long grisly night my reckless soul and sensibility have been haunting me . . . haunting me to find and live out since practically the toddler stage.''
Most pleasing in this thoroughly satisfying novel is Woodrell's agility with language. In a style perfectly matching his characters and story, Woodrell writes a sort of homespun, corn-pone poetry, compelling in both its excess and silence. ``The moon had gotten blood on its face,'' he writes. ``There was some wind kicking up in the night, a hint of fractious weather on the way. The tall trees wobbled in sudden stops and starts, like paranoid druggies, their leaves speed-rappin' nonsensical prattle.''
Always on the edge, but never over the line of believability, Woodrell's prose is stunningly original.
But Give Us A Kiss succeeds neither on the strength of its voice nor the originality of its prose. It succeeds because beneath the self conscious and high-pitched wail of its cast lies the simple, honest story of hollow lives clutched from the dark hollows of Americana.
At its deepest and most complex, Give Us A Kiss is about destiny, an all too human destiny, born and buried of karma, land and blood. It is at once tragic and redeeming, petty, arresting and grand. It is a novel that should guarantee Woodrell's destiny beside the best, most interesting writers of our time. MEMO: Eugene M. McAvoy is a writer who lives in Norfolk. by CNB