The Noir Inside Me
Tuesday, August 7, 2012 at 10:03AM
A friend gifted me a set of Jim Thompson paperbacks the other day. I've read Thompson before and love the movies The Grifters and The Getaway (Peckinpah and McQueen please, let's not even talk about the other one). I know how dark Thompson is, and to be honest I do like the dark. In my bookclub, I have the reputation of bringing the darkest and bleakest books to the year's reading list (introduced them to The Road, American Pastoral, and DeLillo's, Endzone to name a few).
But here is what I have been wondering - how do these dark, bleak books affect me? I don't read for escapism, I never have, and if I wanted to escape, then why into a dark book? Incidentally, I also love all of Graham Greene's work (notably Power and the Glory and the Comedians), and Flannery O'Connor, and Faulkner, and... well, the list goes on.
So, if I am not reading to escape, and some of my favorite authors live in the dark, am I a dark and brooding guy? Is violence bubbling up within me, climbing to the surface, ready to explode at any minute? Well, if you know me, I think you'd say the opposite.
I recall someone on our bookclub asking me why I like this stuff. Don't I ever read "happy books"? I can't remember my exact response, but it had to do with facing into a broken world. Lately in the news there have been two more mass murders. When I hear of these, I am sickened, I can barely read the news article - and I certainly do not follow the coverage on CNN. But somehow within the confines of fiction, I can confront the darkness that exists in all of us. I don't try to make sense of it, but I do want to be aware of it. I don't want to sleepwalk though life, only waiting for the next sale at Walmart, or worrying about the best lawn fertilizer. It seems weird (and I am not trying to create some convincing argument), but I can better contemplate the darkness of the world, and that which exists inside me, through fiction.
When I finish a great book (like Richard Ford's Canada), I am changed. There is a lot of sadness in that book - and the realism dances close to the edge (similar to reading articles about the shootings). But the resonance of a broken family, the idea of crossing borders, both physical and mental, and the landscape itself, seep into me, and make me think a different way. This is always my highest praise for a book - it changes the way I think.
Now, I can't say this about noir books like Thompson's, and I don't read a lot of them. James Ellroy is a bit this way for me to. I couldn't read more than one Ellroy book in a row - and I often need the space of a year or so in-between. I have been reading more crime fiction lately, partly because I do dabble in it. Correction Line has "brooding violence", as one reviewer called it. There is violence in my other novel, Fall in One Day, and some of my short stories. Reading Thompson, and Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake), I am struck by the lack of graphic description, and yet the terror implied, even more so, by what is not said. When Stark says, "Then I shot him and he fell in the hole.", and that's it... there is so much more resonance and power than the overly graphic detail of some modern writers. Read the last part of A Good Man is Hard to Find (O'Connor), and you will see what I mean.
This is a longer post than I intended - and maybe I will return to this topic. Just to end it, I wanted to add that when I read these books, it is not the crime or the violence that I am interested in - it is the characters, and what they say about us all. The Sheriff in No Country for Old Men is one of my favorite characters in fiction. He struggles to understand what the world has come to, and how he fits into a world that allows a killer like Chigurh to exist. In another, very different direction, Joe Lansdale's Hap and Leonard books explore male friendship - and better than most books I read. They are in a violent setting, a violent culture, and they themselves are violent (though, Hap struggles with it). But within that setting, they have a very deep friendship. They are also funny as hell, which I think you gotta be.
Cuz, life is funny, not ha-ha funny, peculiar I guess. (Thank-you Eels).
More another time.
Reader Comments (1)
Love all things noir. For me, it's another genre. I don't read fantasy or scifi or much straight mystery. But loving noir is like loving Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas and Barbara Stanwyk, etc etc. It's always the faces from the films I see when I read the books. Thompson for me is like candy. I can read three or four of his right in a row. But for writing I prefer Cain and Chandler and esp Hammett. But then, if I had my way, my entire house would be furnished and decorated like a noir from the 1950s. I love it like you love cubism, or romanticism in painting. It's a style, an attitude, it paints a world where everyone is almost always in trouble and behaving badly. Gotta love that.