Tomato Red
Daniel Woodrell
No Exit hbk, 240 pgs, £10.00
Review by Gerald Houghton (1998)
See, it starts when a career offender called Sammy Barlach happens to wake up in the house he busted his way into. A big house, a rich house. And there are these two kids standing there, one a girl with tomato red hair, and the other a boy. A beautiful boy. 'The prettiest boy in the Ozarks.' He's called Jason and she's Jamalee and they no more belong here than Sammy himself does.
Everyone in Daniel Woodrell's sparky new novel is pretty much poor white trash. That's all you ever are if you come from West Table, Missouri. Especially if you have the pleasure to come from Venus Holler. ('The name got to be Venus Holler...precisely because a goddess is the very last dame you'd ever expect to find there - but if you did, for three bucks you could fuck her too.')
Jason and Jamalee's momma is Bev Merridew and she's made a career out of turning tricks. It's what you do. Unless you're the smart, volcanic Jamalee and then you start and think that maybe your beautiful, beautiful brother is your way out, seeing as how every female in West Table is gagging for a piece of him - and not a few of the men. And that's okay because, chips on the table, Jason ain't nothing but a country queer.
So they get to asking Sammy Barlach - 'He's got that 'born to lose and lose violently' air about him' - if he'll muscle for them. Excepting, Sammy ain't there when Jason - that beautiful child - fetches up dead and everyone starts on telling Bev and Jamalee it was an unfortunate accident and as how they shouldn't ask further. 'Pretty didn't help much against mean,' Sammy concludes, 'and mean had its way right exactly here.'
Woodrell is the author if three idiosyncratic cop tales, including the excellent Under The Bright Lights, and that delicious, self-styled 'country noir' Give Us A Kiss. Tomato Red is of a piece with that latter, a sexy, funny, richly evocative high-class novel about low class things, written with a real diamond-tipped elegance. Every word in Woodrell, no matter how odd, counts towards something. It's not far off our mark to call him the white trash Barry Gifford.
And best of all, he manages to cement these oddly appealing leads in a bizarre, queasy, but somehow functional family. Sammy will fuck Bev, Bev will fuck Sammy, and Jamalee says of her mother, 'I've got everything she's got, you know, but only without all the mileage.' And they're probably just about the only ones round these parts who don't want into Jason's pants. But death, especially murder, has ways of doing things to even the best of families: 'The smallness of the truth can rub the mind wrong.' A wonderful book.