HOME | ABOUT | FICTION | INTERVIEWS | FEATURES | REVIEWS | NEWS | BUY THE PRINT MAGAZINE | BACK ISSUES | LINKS | CONTACT US

Written in 1954 but only now published here in the UK for the first time, The Blonde On The Street Corner is deceptive. For one thing, a fist fight and a fuck aside, nothing happens. It's a book about people caught by circumstance.

1936. Ralph Creel is thirty-years-old, lives with his extended family of parents and sisters, and does nothing. Nothing except hang on the street corner ('There was no other place to go'), munch Indian Nuts and smoke. His closest friends are all the same. There are no jobs - supposing they want jobs - no ambition and, one suspects, no future. Ralph and Ken half-heartedly write songs and there is talk about Florida, but you know it's all hot air.

Goodis' book reads like a paean to the unfocused desperation of his own life. As Jim Sallis records in Difficult Lives, from the age of 33 Goodis returned home to Philadelphia, spending his nights frequenting ghetto bars and nightclubs, searching out verbal abuse from obese black women. His Ralph is angry but resigned, trapped in a hand-to-mouth existence but too pliable to the wills of others to finally abscond.

At its best, the writing in The Blonde On The Street Corner summons an extraordinary prose poetry: 'The glitter, the glimmer, the gloss and the glow.' Dialogue is snappy, description surreal, and imagined through a disturbing high pressure narrative. Let's hope Serpent's Tail don't stop the roundabout of Goodis reissues here. •

© 2011 THE EDGE and individual contributors. All rights reserved. All contributors reserve the right to be identified as the authors of all works credited to them on this site. Nothing should be reproduced without permission. THE EDGE magazine was founded in 1990, before anything else of that name or similar. The opinions of individual writers are not necessarily those of the editor.