Under the Bright Lights
Daniel Woodrell
No Exit pbk, 182 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1996)
You'd have to wonder why, given the fulsome praise dotted across the introductory pages, this particular Daniel Woodrell novel has taken a decade to see British publication. The Guardian, GQ, and i-D are all well and good, but any author who can stir a fair wind behind him blown by the likes of Robert Campbell, James Crumley, and the masterful Barry Gifford ("he walks his own walk and talks his own talk") could die a happy man.
Under The Bright Lights is the first of Woodrell's sweaty, lurid Cajun country St. Bruno novels: a city equipped like all the best American cities with its own underclass - Frogtown, "the white-trash Paris".
"St. Brunians were imbued with an unfriendly blend of ancestral pride, self toughness, and purposeful ignorance that served to produce succeeding generations of only slightly less narrow views than the generation that had laid the bricks that still paved the streets."
Woodrell plots simply. A black man - "Afro-Sheen sort of guy" - lays dead, his demise to be investigated by series detective Rene Shade. But the man was a prominent city councillor, and this investigation will take Shade to City Hall as well as the swamps ringing the city.
"The pecking order of the home-grown juice merchants and trigger jerkers, green-felt Caesars, and snow-shovelling cowboys was likened to a vivid Chicago of the memory."
Jewell Cobb is pure hillbilly trash - "a plowboy hard-ass" - come to the city to make something of himself: "no visible means of support and a glob of blond hair that he piles up like a sort of Casper the Ghost Elvis." At the behest of cousin Duncan it all starts with a gun. But Duncan is slightly less pig-thick than his kin and knows when a man - even one he's related too - is expendable.
Like No Exit's previous discovery Muscle For The Wing, this book is bayou noir, caught in the harsh headlights of a speeding getaway car. Comparison is easily drawn with the self-serving, duplicitous pouring water on a drowning man of the late, delinquently great Jim Thompson. Good and evil are a question of degree.
Shade is half-and-half, Franco-Irish American, dealing with the bad-guys, the politicians (in this book, the same thing) and his own, less-than-straight-and-narrow brothers. Like the best of the best (Leonard, Willeford, Thompson) he is all shades (sic) of grey. This is what he does for a living.
The end of this book is less successful than Muscle. Everything falls to a swamp-chase that rounds off neatly but leaves you picking distractedly at your teeth. That other book's pay-off was black and ugly; this is a little too much Cape Fear-familiar for that. It's a caveat, but one supplemental to an otherwise needle-sharp slab of beguiling, misanthropic and just plain mean penmanship.