Bizarre Magazine
February 2002

America's Least Wanted

Crackers, cornhuskers, rednecks and trailer trash are America's cultural whipping boys, the thicko inbreds it's OK to hate. 'Jim Goad said it all, and well,' says Daniel Woodrell, referring to the former Answer Me! boss's book, The Redneck Manifesto which makes, and backs up, these points about the white American underclass.

Woodrell, author of modern classics like Muscle For The Wing, The Ones You Do and Woe To Live On (the latter made into the film Ride With The Devil by Ang Lee) also writes about these people. His next book, which will go down as his masterpiece, The Death Of Sweet Mister, takes you to the heart of America's most brutalised merciless quarters. It is the story of Shug, a 13-year-old boy, who lives ina graveyard and spends each day watching his mother, Glenda, getting raped, beaten and humiliated by her husband Red, who may or may not be his father. The only attention Red expends on the kid is forcing him to steal drugs off dying housebound cancer patients. Slowly and surely, Red begins to fashion Shug in his own image. 'Monsters beget monsters,' as the author points out. 'Shug learns what tones and acts carry weight in his world and none of them are kind, or of that much use in other worlds.'

The extraordinary, sparse beauty of the language Woodrell uses to convey this tale of innocence lost is akin to the haunting hillbilly bluegrass score of the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?. The timeless refrain of the Ozark Mountains is the soul that popular opinion says white trash doesn't have...the soul that Woodrell inherited at birth: 'My grandmother was an illiterate domestic, stiff with religious fervour. My father never overcame his hatred of organised religion and the stain of being the son of an illiterate servant. So he drank and shared his hostilities with his sons. I've never held a job in my life, often fired within hours. I was kicked out of the Marines for 'pronounced anti-social tendencies' and assume some of my crankiness comes from dear ol' dad. Still, in all, not the worst inheritance.'

The author lives in a neighbourhood that would be familiar to Shug. 'My area is full of grit life and crank (methamphetamine) cookers. The kid who weeded our garden was wanted on a fugitive warrant, the lady below arrested for hooking. You do run into 'families' with no father where the teenage son is in charge and the mother clutches his arm and looks on him in a manner not altogether motherly.'

The Death Of Sweet Mister is the most pared-down of Woodrell's books: 'I wanted this book to be pared to the bones, the bones speaking. Shug's voice is leeched of illusion and the challenge was to keep the scenes as honest as the voice. At one point I had to wrestle for a week with the possibility of, 'Hey, couldn't some happier Walt Disney finish pop up to save the boy?' But, no, the only true ending was already there.'

Woodrell presents the world of the Ozarkers with such clarity that you can feel his characters walking into a room, shudder through their crank shakkes, hear the bluegrass/rockabilly soundtrack twanging in their heads. When he wrote his Civil War novel, Woe To Live On, he only had to look at photographs of his ancestors to hear the voices they used.

'Language is the steeple, the point of it all. If I had the stamina, the willingness to be more of a risk-taker, I would be a poet. Bluegrass and rockabilly seem tribal to me. I see famil photos in the dark when I hear such music. Some Celtic stuff makes me weepy and wounded, grieving for logn-ago losses I never suffered. As to conjuring, well, I have strange little neo-mystical rites that I should probably keep to myself.'

For now, Woodrell believes he has reached a peak: 'I've attained a new control and hard utter ruthlessness toward the material which very much agrees with me. I like lean books as the bloat in a novel rots and becomes misshapen over time.'

Read it and weep for the lost white trash you never knew you cared for.

Woodrell On His Favourite Authors

'A complete list would be heavy on the Southern writers, Babel, Hemingway, Chekhov, Camus etc. Those less-often mentioned include:

• David Storey (he was eye-opening to me in my early 20s as regards class issues)
• Alan Sillitioe (ditto)
• Edward Anderson
• James Hanley
• Cesare Pavese
• Tom Kromer (one novel, a masterpiece)
• Elio Vittorini
• Nelson Algren
• Grazia Deledda
• John McGahern
• Horace McCoy (three noirs, tow of which are great)
• Charles Williams
• Jack O'Connell (a neglected genius of our moment)
• Carolyn Chute
• George Pelecanos
• Dennis Lehane
• James Sallis.

I wish I'd written The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner. John Updike titled his review of it, 'Notes from Downtroddendom' - a patronising slap from the privileged that I use as motivation to attack, throw those hands, keep going forward.'