Finished Su 9/14/20
Last week I watched the movie with James Spader and Eric Stoltz and was confused, but I thought that the idea was great. I found the book on Amazon and ordered and I'm glad that I did. I'll watch the movie again (Amazon Prime) soon.
Set in Tulsa, OK during the early 80's- The Reagan Years. The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 is mentioned. I watched two YouTube documentaries about this incident of American genocide. May 31st, 1921 the white townspeople burned down the entire successful Black area of the town. Greenwood was destroyed and hundreds of blacks were murdered. In a town of 100,000, three thousand people belonged to The Ku Klux Klan.
"Redneck Film Noire"
Richter Boudreau is a boozed up, drug addled newspaper reporter. He's barely hanging on to his job and writes movie reviews when it's convenient. He also teaches a college film class. He was born rich, but now has sunk to the bottom.
He falls under the spell of an old girlfriend, Vicky Stover. When he was in high school he was friends with Vicky's brother, Keith. Keith is now a morbidly obese man who does nothing but drink and drug. He is very rich and lives off his inheritance.
Vicky is now married to Ronnie. He's an over-aged juvenile delinquent who has come up with kidnapping plan. He knows a stripper who witnessed the murder of another stripper by a wealthy and well-connected white man. He wants to hit them up for over a million dollars in blackmail.
The book is about how Richter tries to get a handle on 'the plan and the players'.
The review at Publishers Weekly:
"Berkey's manic and wildly raunchy debut novel is not likely to be warmly received by the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce. He takes us on a seven-day out-of-control grand tour of this Western city's extensive seamy side. Berkey leaves skid marks on Oral Roberts University and racist country clubs, and rampages through the red-light district with quick pit stops in striptease parlors and drug dens. The company is less than wholesome: hookers, heroin addicts, a murderer or two, extortionists, millionaire prairie preachers and yahoos galore. It's as if the cast of Taxi Driver were to invade the set of True Grit ; a sort of redneck film noire. And it succeeds smashingly. Richter Boudreau, the novel's central character, is the ultimate scamp. He's a wisecracking Berkeley graduate in deep trouble with gangsters and the police. Not the least of his concerns is that he owes a lot of money to a temperamental drug dealer involved in blackmailing some of Tulsa's leading citizens. Richter's love life--by turns absurdly romantic and unbelievably sleazy--only complicates the mess. One of the most fiendish characters is Richter's very own mother, a glorious manipulator bent on straightening out her errant son. Mixed up in the story is Richter's partner in vice, journalist George Brinkman, who is investigating the death of a topless dancer, the novel's main mystery. Berkey's only bad habit is his continual mockery of the characters' cornball accents. It's the one note of condescension in a novel of great sympathy and enjoyment. The keys to Berkey's Tulsa unlock a raucous and exciting world."
From the book:
"Tulsa was a sociopolitical jerkwater, an isolated pocket of oilmen, defense contractors, racists, Republicans, and religious fanatics a place forgotten by time, like one of those tiny hamlets in the Appalachians where they still spoke Elizabethan English. Heterogeneous opinion was inappropriate; you spoke the common language or you kept your mouth shut."
I would love to read more by this author, but apparently this was his only book. Too bad, I would have loved to read more.
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