Did someone talk about the voices Lou hears as being from
within? Given
all the other hokey stuff "they" pulled to break him down, I
assumed that
the voice of the kid, Johnnie, that Lou hears in his cell was
indeed a
recording; likewise, the slides of Amy on the wall. If they
aren't, do we
have reliability questions about other things Lou tells us?
Does a doc
really visit him? Since Thompson had Lou narrate, he can't
have him mix
reality and hallucination too much, at least not without
clues for the
reader.
If we're talking about what's convincing or not in the book,
I found the
labor leader a bit of a stretch--both the fact that a small
Texas town
would be unionized, and that Rothman would be so afraid of
being implicated
if Lou were taken to court. Or does Rothman get Billy Boy as
a lawyer so
that other dirt will come out about the town establishment,
especially
Conway?
Most impressive this read-through is the communicated "soul"
of Lou, the
way he separates himself from people and manipulates them
from a position
of amoral superiority. On the one hand, we have some of the
most
misanthropic views of small town (or maybe anytown) humanity,
particularly
in terms of body types; on the other hand, his mask of
dumbness, his use of
American cliches that accomplish two purposes--calm the dumb
and irritate
the intelligent. What's most brilliant is his use of these
cliches with
folks like Conway and the D.A. who "know" what he's
concealing. And at the
very moment Lou is irritating the D.A.with cliches and
out-thinking him,
the deputy with him gets upset because the D.A. transgresses
acceptable
language in accusing Lou.
The malice, the misanthropy reminds me of Twain at his
darkest, of the
famous line from Huck Finn--something like "The fools in town
are on our
side, and that's a majority in any town." Course Ross Thomas
picked up the
first part for the title of a pretty good novel. But knowing
you've been
discovered, but continuing to play the game--it gives one a
whole new
perspective on Chaucer's "Pardoner." Shoot, I may just write
a piece for
some academic meeting entitled "How Jim Thompson Helped Me
Understand
Chaucer."
Biographically, I get the idea that Thompson was paying off
socio-economic
debts, articulating the venom of the kid who stays in the
small town, and
has to put up with the local rich SOBs, as well as the
outsiders with
college degrees who come in and run things.
Bill Hagen
<billha@ionet.net>
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