Times Literary Supplement
February 2002
reviewed by: Bharat Tandon

Although he is probably best known in Britain for having provided the source text for Ang Lee's film Ride With The Devil, Daniel Woodrell's fiction has also been mapping out the Ozarks as a territory for regional Gthic, and The Death of Sweet Mister continues this endeavour. An Oedipal noir story set during the distant but threatening Vietnam War, the novel manages to create a convincing vernacular narrative for its troubled adolescent protagonist, which goes some way towards offsetting the familiarity of the scenario. Indeed, the very inevitability with which the events unfold gives the book added force.

Although the novel is filled with the dead and dying, the central 'death' of the title is a metaphorical one: the transition into corrupt adulthood. Shug, an overweight, pubescent thirteen-year-old, is being alternately beaten up and trained as a burglar by Red Akins, husband to the boy's mother, a small-time crook whose voice has 'those worms in it that eat you once you're dead and still'. Shug is sent by Red and his accomplice, Basil, to steal dope from doctor's storerooms and from beneath the noses of the terminally ill, and the only solcace he can find is in the company of his mother, Glenda, with whom he tends the local graveyard, and shares what is left of his childhood life, eating ice-cream and picking berries. But even as they pick fruit, the life ahead begins to shadow them:

"After we'd kicked a ways down the dusty road she said, 'You wake up in this here world, my sweet li'l mister, you got to wake up tough. You go out that front door tough of a mornin' and you stay tough 'til lights out ...have you learned that?' 'I think so.'"

Unfortunately for them, part of that "waking up tough" involves Shug's waning resistance to his mother's booze-fuelled flirtatiousness ('My mom let men have ideas about her. Some would say me too'). As the novel progresses, Woodrell filters the growing tension through the hormonal ferment of Shug's feelings. Glenda takes up with a suave restaurant chef in a Thunderbird, but Shug, rather than feeling relieved, grows subconsciously more jealous. It takes Shug's discovery of the traces of Red's murder to bring his own feelings into focus, and the prelude to his final, incestuous trespass sees the innocence of "Sweet Mister" consciously set aside at last, as he delivers to Red's vengeful friends and family the proof that will leave Glenda eventually, to him.

It is to Woodrell's credit that this uncomfortable piece of work is somewhat diminished by synopsis; much of its effect depends on his narrative selection. For all the brutality of the novel, death is always offstage; nevertheless, if is everywhere in Shug's imangination and subconscious. The plot, tawdry in the abstract, is transformed by Woodrell's gallows humour and his rendering of Shug's voice, part Huck Finn, part Holden Caulfield ("song birds and bumble bees and all the likewise shit of spring"), while the pressures of psychological confusion surface in Shug's unacknowledged obsession with meat, worms, decay and consumption. In this novel, sins of the flesh are just that: Red's brother comes home from the war with a leg "like a sausage link that had got shoved to the back of the fridge and forgot about"; the last trace of Red is "a sliver of meat ...from some part of a person". Woodrell will, perhaps inevitably, be compared to Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell and Cormac McCarthy but a better parallel is with the stories of James M Cain, where sexual and economic necessity become indistinguishable. It remains to be seen whether, in a culture of collective rubbernecking, stories of "dysfunction in regional America can be rescued from the likes of Jerry Springer. If so, Daniel Woodrell stands as good a chance as any of bringing it off.