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A review by rosseroo
They Don't Dance Much by Daniel Woodrell, James Ross
5.0
I'll admit that this caught my eye because I share the author's last name -- but when I picked it up and read the jacket copy, and saw that Daniel Woodrell was championing it, I figured I should give it a go. I was immediately caught up in the down-and-out life of Jack McDonald, whose farm in central North Carolina is in hock to the bank, and whose furniture is in hock to the town's installment-plan dealer -- even his cow has a note on it. The Great Depression has his woeful life firmly in its grip -- until he drifts into the orbit of Smut Milligan, who runs a filling station just outside town that sells alcohol on the sly, and is known to run some gambling out of a back room.
Smut has an eye to the future and thinks there's good money to made in opening a full-fledged roadhouse restaurant, with a dancing saloon, and cabins to rent to tourists. He hires Jack as a kind of assistant manager, and the story takes its time in showing them working to set up the new establishment. One of the great strengths of the book is how it captures the townspeople, from the rough cotton mill workers to the more upscale hosiery mill workers, the baseball players down for spring training, the lawyer who runs the county, the drunk newspaper man, the ex-strike breaker, the town vamp, and all manner of colorful folks. (One area of potential discomfort to modern readers are the African-American characters, whose speech is sometimes rendered in dialect, and who are referred to by the "n-word" throughout. Which is not to say they aren't fully fledged characters with their own backstories, goals, and personalities.)
Everything starts to go well -- until Smut's flirtation with the town vamp, who's married to a town bigwig, starts to heat up just as he struggles to pay back the loans he took to start the roadhouse. And when Jack and he learn of a regular patron who is said to have $20,000 buried on his property, things take a dark and extremely violent turn. Indeed, the violence is so stark and graphic that it comes as a real shock. From then on out, the tension ratchets up as the murder is covered up and the killers begin to argue about the money they find. The ending may not be satisfying to a modern audience expecting a clear payoff, but it's perfectly in keeping with the noir literature and films of the time.
The mastery of character, tone, and language make it clear why this book has been championed variously by writers as disparate as Raymond Chandler, Flannery O'Connor, and George V. Higgins. It's got a classic noir loser trapped by life with no options, a more active, but greedy collaborator, a femme fatale, and of course, the establishment (banks, the law, the sheriff) are all corrupt and in league with each other. If you like writers like Horace McCoy, Jim Thompson, or David Goodis, definitely check this out.
Smut has an eye to the future and thinks there's good money to made in opening a full-fledged roadhouse restaurant, with a dancing saloon, and cabins to rent to tourists. He hires Jack as a kind of assistant manager, and the story takes its time in showing them working to set up the new establishment. One of the great strengths of the book is how it captures the townspeople, from the rough cotton mill workers to the more upscale hosiery mill workers, the baseball players down for spring training, the lawyer who runs the county, the drunk newspaper man, the ex-strike breaker, the town vamp, and all manner of colorful folks. (One area of potential discomfort to modern readers are the African-American characters, whose speech is sometimes rendered in dialect, and who are referred to by the "n-word" throughout. Which is not to say they aren't fully fledged characters with their own backstories, goals, and personalities.)
Everything starts to go well -- until Smut's flirtation with the town vamp, who's married to a town bigwig, starts to heat up just as he struggles to pay back the loans he took to start the roadhouse. And when Jack and he learn of a regular patron who is said to have $20,000 buried on his property, things take a dark and extremely violent turn. Indeed, the violence is so stark and graphic that it comes as a real shock. From then on out, the tension ratchets up as the murder is covered up and the killers begin to argue about the money they find. The ending may not be satisfying to a modern audience expecting a clear payoff, but it's perfectly in keeping with the noir literature and films of the time.
The mastery of character, tone, and language make it clear why this book has been championed variously by writers as disparate as Raymond Chandler, Flannery O'Connor, and George V. Higgins. It's got a classic noir loser trapped by life with no options, a more active, but greedy collaborator, a femme fatale, and of course, the establishment (banks, the law, the sheriff) are all corrupt and in league with each other. If you like writers like Horace McCoy, Jim Thompson, or David Goodis, definitely check this out.