DanWilde1966
13th April 2005, 05:04 PM
This writer seems to be little-known in the UK, apart (of course) from fanatics in the loop. For me, he is utterly compulsive. Like many great writers, he simply retold the same story over and over again (he died in 1967). Each novel opens with the image of a loser at the bottom of the barrel: a man waking up in the gutter as the sun rises, for instance, or a bunch of dead-beats sitting outside the doss-house, pan-handling for enough money for the next bottle of booze. Then, as the narrative unfolds, it turns out that the central character used to be extremely successful: Whitey in The Street of No Return, for example, used to be a professional singer. The main character in Down There used to be a concert pianist. Each novel builds up a scenario/milieu of human suffering, then flashes back to the earlier time of success. Inevitably, a woman is the cause of the tragedy/downfall.
Imagine Rick from Casablanca returning to the US after WW2, and falling on profoundly hard times, and you've got the general idea of Goodis's fiction. The prose is as hard-boiled as one of Delia's eggs. It's readable and very entertaining. The themes are existentialist in many ways. Goodis started his career in the pulps, but in the years since his death, people like the French have elevated him to the status of literature - rightly, in my view. He also influenced the Nouvelle Vague, and had one of his books made into a movie by Truffaut. A number of his other works (such as Dark Passage and The Moon in the Gutter) have been filmed.
Imagine Rick from Casablanca returning to the US after WW2, and falling on profoundly hard times, and you've got the general idea of Goodis's fiction. The prose is as hard-boiled as one of Delia's eggs. It's readable and very entertaining. The themes are existentialist in many ways. Goodis started his career in the pulps, but in the years since his death, people like the French have elevated him to the status of literature - rightly, in my view. He also influenced the Nouvelle Vague, and had one of his books made into a movie by Truffaut. A number of his other works (such as Dark Passage and The Moon in the Gutter) have been filmed.