And yeah, I felt pretty unclean myself as I read it. At times
it reads like
the protagonist is a modern-day version of Steinbeck's Tom
Joad riding into
the new Depression, who's decided, to hell with everything,
I'm getting
what's mine. In a way, at the end, he's already joined the
bosses, though
he doesn't know it yet.
And this reminded me of something William Denton mentioned a
few days ago:
"....Arlo Guthrie doesn't seem like he'd read Himes."
I dunno. This is the son who walks in the father's
footprints, and it was
Woody himself who wrote a zillion socialist anthems, about
bank robbers and
farmers, killers and Christ, very down on big money and the
slimy, corrupt
powers that be.
"And in this life I wander,
And I've seen lots of crooked men,
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
Some with a fountain pen."
This land is your land, indeed....
I like to think the aw-shucks-hayseed schtick that Arlo puts
on is as big a
crock as his dad's was...and the in-yer-face,
anti-authoritarian stance of
a lot of his songs seems remarkably similar to the mindset of
The Ax and
many, many other hardboiled novels.
Kevin Smith
The Thrilling Detective Web Site
http://www.colba.net/~kvnsmith/thrillingdetective/
The January issue is out, with new fiction by Duane
Swierczynski and Hugh
Lessig,
and The 1998 Cheap Thrills awards continue in our P.I. Poll.
What were your
P.I. favorites last year?
#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.