An Ozark odyssey you won't forget
Here's another johnny-come-lately endorsement for Daniel Woodrell, whose 2006 novel Winter's Bone is a great piece of writing. I'd never heard of this author until Uriah at Crime Scraps mentioned Woodrell's novel Tomato Red in a post the other day. The passage he quoted was so evocative that I decided to investigate.
Woodrell is a superb stylist, and with this particular protagonist, plot and setting, he's created something that reads a lot like literature. A 16-year-old Ozark mountain girl has become the de facto head of the house since her no-account dad decamped to parts unknown. He's put up the house and land as bond, and unless he can be found, the girl and her young brothers will be left homeless during a particularly bleak winter.
The story reminds me of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain -- a noble quest in a brutish world -- and I've not seen characters so sharply and economically drawn in a long while. While the milieu of rural crank labs and amoral tribalism is pretty grim, there is also enough humor to humanize it.
I'll be reading the rest of Daniel Woodrell's novels in the weeks to come.
Woodrell is a superb stylist, and with this particular protagonist, plot and setting, he's created something that reads a lot like literature. A 16-year-old Ozark mountain girl has become the de facto head of the house since her no-account dad decamped to parts unknown. He's put up the house and land as bond, and unless he can be found, the girl and her young brothers will be left homeless during a particularly bleak winter.
The story reminds me of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain -- a noble quest in a brutish world -- and I've not seen characters so sharply and economically drawn in a long while. While the milieu of rural crank labs and amoral tribalism is pretty grim, there is also enough humor to humanize it.
I'll be reading the rest of Daniel Woodrell's novels in the weeks to come.
Comments
I'm just happy to have stumble onto such a good writer. Tomato Red is next on the list.
I wrote a brief review as part of a nine-book round-up on Petrona last week. Brilliant, as well as short (I always appreciate short books!). A poetic novella.
I was particularly moved by this book because I've had occasion to know real people and places not so far removed from the Dolly clan.
(I wondered how some of the colloquialisms might be received across the pond, but apparently they posed no problem.)