Crime Scene: DANIEL WOODRELL Winter’s Bone. Reviewed by Peter Corris
A novel of abandonment, crank and the Ozarks, written with flinty integrity.
Daniel Woodrell has written several novels set in the Ozark region of the central United States. One critic has termed his work ‘hillbilly noir’, and if you’re interested in this sub-genre, Winter’s Bone, first published in 2006 and filmed in 2010, is a good place to start.
Ree Dolly, a 16-year-old girl, has been left in charge of her demented mother and two younger brothers by her father, Jessup. The mother is a victim, sent mad by her life as an abused good-time gal and the wife of a feckless criminal husband:
Came a time when Mom told Ree about those nights … The time of telling came when Mom sensed the smoky nights were done for her and she’d taken to fingering the memories of them from her rocking chair. She’d absorbed a few beatings for love in the life and gotten over them, but it was those terrible ass-whippings she’d taken during one-night stands, motel quickies, from fellas at the Bar Circle Z ranch, or handsome tramps in town that had hung with her. Those times just hung in the mind swaying, swaying, casting shadows behind her eyes forever.
Jessup, charged with running a methamphetamine (which they call crank) laboratory, has posted his house and land as a bond but this has not met the required bail. An anonymous stranger has covered the shortfall in cash and left with Jessup, who is now, mysteriously and disturbingly, missing. If he doesn’t show up in court in a few days, Ree, the mother and the boys will be, as she puts it, ‘out in the fields’.
Life is tough in the Ozarks, especially for the women. Ree dreams of escaping by joining the army. She reflects on a woman’s lot otherwise:
The women came to mind, bigger, closer, with their lonely eyes and homely yellow teeth, mouths clamped against smiles, working in the hot fields from can to can’t, hands tattered rough as dry cobs, lips cracked all winter, a white dress for marrying, a black dress for burying, and Ree nodded. Yup.
Ree is tough and resourceful and the story revolves around her search for Jessup, which brings her up against members of her own clan and others less friendly – not that the other Dollys are necessarily friendly.
The Ozarks, a large stretch of high country intersected by valleys and streams, appears to a non-resident almost as a foreign country. The men in Woodrell’s story are violent and lawless, users of the drugs they prepare and grow and proud of their toughness and ability to withstand prison terms. The women are mostly submissive until a particular nerve – to do with family and their own gender – is touched. Then watch out!
The ideas of Woodrell’s Ozark people are strange, a legacy of the fast-fading remnant of their primitive Protestant faith …
Most places still had two front doors in accordance with certain readings of scripture, one door for men, the other for women, though nobody much used them strictly that way anymore.
… plus the effects of their rudimentary education and a residual sense of grievance. Even their language is peculiar:
Flashing lights were dizzying, and the headlights behind shined fiercely into the truck. She shaded her eyes and squinted. It was Baskin in a green deputy’s coat and an official Smokey hat.
Shined? And what is a Smokey hat?
The power of Woodrell’s writing stems from his long association with this culture (a note on the author informs us that his family has lived in the Ozarks since the Civil War). His choice of words makes the harsh landscape so familiar to him seem active, almost alive:
The truck crested a ridge and rolled downhill to a stark valley that narrowed to a springwater creek. Bluffs of dour stone shrugged above the bottoms, streaked black by ages of drip, with little boulders knocked low to the water’s edge.
There are moments of humour – between Ree and her brothers and between her and ‘Uncle Teardrop’, Jessup’s brother, a crank user whose time in prison has bequeathed him two teardrop-shaped tattoos to go with a scar from an explosion when a drug preparation went wrong.
Not surprisingly, guns figure largely in the fabric of the story. Everybody seems to own at least one. A man is prized because he is willing to shoot to kill ‘which not everyone is’. Ree teaches her brothers to shoot, ostensibly to get squirrels for the pot, but with the knowledge that they’re going to need the skill eventually, perhaps soon.
This is a relentless, hard-hitting story with a central character who, despite her apparent ignorance of spoken grammar, has the imaginative capacity at times of stress to envision something better and comforting. In Ree Dolly, Woodrell has created a character who commands respect and admiration without even hints of the sentimentality that weakens the work of so many American hard-case, hard-times writers. I plan to watch the film now to see whether any of the flinty integrity of the book can be captured.
Daniel Woodrell Winter’s Bone Hodder & Stoughton 2007 PB 208pp $22.99
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I think a Smokey hat might be a “Smokey the Bear” hat – Smokey the Bear was a cartoon used by the National Parks to prevent forest fires and had big hat – a bit like the old boy scout hats.
As for the use of “shined” that didn’t strike me as odd – car lights have always “shined” in the US.
Ann (originally from Springfield Mass)