TOMATO RED by Daniel Woodrell

 This is one of my ancient trade paperbacks that I ordered on the Internet in the first week of April, 2007, but I never read it.

Refinished on Tu 6/1/21

From an archived NY Times review:

"The handy rubric ''noir'' has been applied to Daniel Woodrell's five previous novels (the last was actually subtitled ''A Country Noir''), but I would classify his latest -- dealing as it does with the despair of Ozarks poverty -- as hillbilly blue. In any case, ''Tomato Red'' counters its sad themes with storytelling that is vivid, funny and full of bad attitude. Sammy Barlach, the narrator, has a voice like a switchblade, and he uses its edge to undercut the reader's expectations of country folk and of violence itself.

Barlach is also the hero of ''Tomato Red'' -- and we're talking classic, tragic-flaw hero. He is, like all good noir heroes, alienated and drawn to action of the violent variety. New on the scene in West Table, a little Missouri town, he becomes bound up (literally, in the novel's opening pages) with a weird family. Jamalee Merridew, a tiny 19-year-old with hair dyed the color of tomatoes, is trying to turn her beautiful 17-year-old brother, Jason, lusted after by the women of West Table, into a stud whose sexual services will buy the two of them their tickets out of town. However, Jason's sexual anxieties -- he thinks he might be what Ozark folks call ''country queer'' -- make him a poor provider of pleasure, despite a family interest in the trade: his and Jamalee's mother, Bev, is a lusty prostitute.

Sammy is sweet on both women, who have been assigned (in one of the novel's least original conceptions) the predictable roles of whore and unattainable goddess. Bev takes an unseemly amount of pleasure from plying her trade (if we were all this ecstatic at our jobs, we'd be a nation of happy workers). Jamalee regards sex with a complementary portion of dread. Sammy's attraction to the pair is charged by their mother-daughter friction, by his own sexual insecurity and -- in a good twist -- by his ambivalent response to Jason. Sammy experiences Jason's struggle over sexual identity as threatening, but he summons empathy for the boy's problems in a place where homosexuality is regarded as threatening to just about everybody. Woodrell uses both men's sexual fears to propel the novel toward its violent culmination.

All of Woodrell's novels are concerned with male violence, but previously he has sometimes constructed his bloody scenes in seductive ways. The violence in ''Tomato Red'' is just the opposite: it has been deromanticized, stripped of sexual allure. There are plenty of enthusiastic sex scenes in this novel, but it is ultimately sexual terror and class struggle that lead to violence. Many of the conflicts are bright, cartoonish setups -- white trash versus the country-club set -- but Sammy darkens them with reflections that make him sound like Marx on downers: ''You know, the regular well-to-do world should relax about us types. Us lower sorts. You can never mount a true war of us against the rich 'cause the rich can always hire us to kill each other. Which they and us have done plenty, and with brutal dumb glee.'' The last scene of the novel is a grim portrayal of raw violence, yet in its fulfillment of Sammy's prediction, it asserts a clear point about poverty and the preordained roles to which so many poor Americans are consigned. That clarity of vision is itself somehow hopeful.

Woodrell's storytelling is as melodic, jangly and energetic as a good banjo riff. In some of his earlier work, the country voices have been tuned too close to cute, but here all the language is sharp (''Her dress was a size low or so''), and some of it is downright unsettling. Sammy Barlach's story is a tragedy, but the telling of it is a pleasure."

I've got one of his novels in the queue at Amazon and I really should read more by this author... Snappy dialog and quirky characters.