William Denton (buff@pobox.com)
Mon, 14 Jun 1999 21:28:56 -0400 (EDT)
Hi,
I think I mentioned The Baffler once before, but I can't find
it in the archives. However, in the latest issue (#12),
there's a review of Robert Polito's _Crime Novels: American
Noir of the 1930s and 40s_ and _50s_. The reviewer, Mike
Newirth, looks at the selected books (which include titles by
Himes, Willeford, Fearing, Cain and Goodis) and talks about
how they relate to proletarian literature of the '30s,
politics and popular culture. It's well worth reading (as is
the rest of the journal, especially if you like Chicago
lefties).
The final paragraph ends with:
"... The quiet storms of these novels remain inviting against
a contemporary aesthetic where the subtleties of real
violence are lots in the universal translator, dumbed down
into a single sick joke. What real murder or heist or cabal
can reach us--can touch us with the fundamentally perverse
and recognizable human impulses of the perpetrators--now that
we all know enough to appreciate the zany humour of John
Travolta
"accidentally" firing a .45 hollowpoint into the skinny guy's
head, getting hitman Samuel Jackson's kool ride all fucked up
with brains and shit? It's funny, we respond, in unison, as
the synthetic blood patters down, as the Pepsi-drinking
hitman rants on the big screen. We may flinch and giggle, but
we're not particularly surprised or concerned, because what
we're viewing bears no more familiarity or relevance to our
lives than, say, a spectacle of giant gore-spraying gladiator
insects. Despite their hoary vintage, the best of classic
American crime writing offers no such divorce from prosaic
reality, and it's this element that makes them still
convincing and sometimes chilling, and that weaves into even
a book as gray and personal as David Goodis's _Down There_
(1956) an undeniably political consciousness. For readers who
no longer recognize normality, these novels will seem only
dated. But the curious circumstances these long buried
writers portrayed are still with us--the too-quiet cafe, the
too-helpful lawman, the darkness just beyond our brightly lit
spaces--and as the news reports from such ordinary,
frightened places as Junction City and Jonesboro confirm, we
still live in a country where the civil dance of white
flight--lock the door! call 911!--is but a placebo in the
face of ever more probable collisions, a lame imitation of
the safety we crave."
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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