Customer Reviews

The Blonde on the Street Corner (Midnight Classics)

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Forget the title--this book is not about sex. At least, not very much (only a brief reference or two). What it's about is what it's like to live as a young poor person in Philadelphia. The book was written in the 1950's, it's written about the 1930's, but as a former resident of Philadelphia, I can attest to the fact that it is as accurate a depiction of today's world as any other decade. The novel is a small gem that captures the essence of being unemployed and poor in the big city, but without being depressing or moralistic in any way. Doesn't sound like much of a recipe for success, but Goodis is a master at bringing a mood to life. He accomplishes with understatement what most novelists never achieve: genuine, believable characters in real settings. This book has not, to my knowledge, been made into a film as his other works have, which is probably due to the unusual plot structure (basically, not much excitement goes on in the book), but the trueness of his vision soars beyond any limitations. I lived in similar circumstances to the characters in the book, and was astonished at the accuracy that Goodis gives to real life. It's amazing. Worth a read, even if you are only marginally interested. It's a brief page turner that leaves you longing for more, just as the characters in the book feel. This book is a revelation.

Four "bums," all in their early 30s, all still living at home, all hopelesly frozen in the hell of inanimation, stand on the street corner eating Indian nuts and buying 16 cent packs of cigarettes, talking about nothing, doing nothing, going nowhere and not much caring. It is fascinating to think that The Blonde on the Street Corner [1954], stylistically most aytpical of David Goodis' novels, should appear just a year after the publication of alain Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers [Eng. Tr. 1964]. Goodis doesn't go nearly so far as Robbe-Grillet in dispensing with character, plot, and all the other traditional elements of the novel, but he does give us a kind of pulp analogue, with rhythmic repetitions of a domestic ugliness, banality, and violence not much short of the "spirit of ugly" celebrated by William S. Burroughs just a few years down the road.

For Goodis, the icy heart of this ugliness is the essential meaninglessness of things, so that the novel's tired randomness of events moves forward in the kronos of the profane. By default, almost, nothingness becomes the novel's central obsession:

"You don't know what you'll be doing tonight. Or tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow. What are you? What do you do? You stand on the corner. You're one of the bums. You're thirty years old and what do you have?

"Nothing."

"Is that what you want?"

"It gives me very little to worry about. I don't have to think about losing it. There's nothing to lose." (152)

Nothing is mostly what "happens" in this novel, which is only superficially set in the Depression, but could occur at any time in the bleak unending asphalt of row houses and and torn overcoats in the Goodis Urban Freezer. Genuine relationships are impossible to achieve and undesirable to sustain. Marriage and family are dead ends. Work is a humiliating experience, difficult to come by, and ultimately without meaning. As in so many of Goodis's novels, at the center of this one lounges a fat, sensual woman, verbally abusive to everyone around her. Here, though, she is not so much fascinating for the protagonist as she is a way to pass the time, when time itself is of no account. It's as if Goodis had exhausted himself of his own masochistic leitmotif and stood looking in the abyss, seeing and feeling nothing but the cold. "What is this?" says one of the young bums, Dippy, whenever something he doesn't understand arises. It becomes, by novel's end, Goodis's own bewildered ontological question, one he is too far gone to care about asking, much less answering. Recommended for Goodis fans.

David Goodis was one of the major writers of crime noir in the 1940s and '50s. Many of his best works were filmed to good effect, including DARK PASSAGE, with Bogart playing the lead, Tourneur's NIGHTFALL, Truffaut's SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, Sam Fuller's STREET OF NO RETURN, and THE BURGLAR. Goodis's novels painted bleak, black views of the inner-city life he himself lived, populated by losers and drunks. As Ed Gorman once said, Goodis didn't write novels, he wrote suicide notes. But his power lay in his ability to get down on paper the stark reality of the low-life he witnessed around him, before he too fell victim to the type of decline experienced by the characters he wrote about.

It's a tragedy that, apart from this reissue, few of the eighteen novels Goodis wrote are currently in print. This is the first publication of THE BLONDE ON THE STREET CORNER since it originally appeared in a paperback edition in 1954. The story is set during the depression years of the 1930s, in Goodis's own home town of Philadelphia, and seems to be at least partly autobiographical. Ralph and his buddies are out of work, and jobs are not easy to find. He'd like to be a song-writer, but there's little hope of getting that kind of break. Christmas is coming and he needs some money, and the only other options involve crime and sex. With his usual talent for brilliant prose description and language, Goodis takes you effortlessly into the murky realms of depression America to meet the deadbeat characters who populate the streets and bars.

Serpent's Tail Press are to be congratulated for reissuing this long-lost classic by one of the legendary writers of the hardboiled. It's to be hoped that more by Goodis follows from them soon.

This novel is Goodis's classic tale of urban desolation. Like a bleak, sparse George Bellows painting, Goodis' world is master strokes of grim description from torn overcoats to bloodied maws to swearing Santas. At the center is Ralph Creel, a lazy bum torn between his romantic soul and his animalistic instincts. Ralph Creel is a fighter, a survivor, a supremely Goodis creation who like us all, eventually gives in to life, to the Fat Blonde on the Street Corner, but not before he allows the reader to witness some moments of Grace./

This novel is Goodis's classic tale of urban desolation. Like a bleak, sparse George Bellows painting, Goodis' world is master strokes of grim description from torn overcoats to bloodied maws to swearing Santas. At the center is Ralph Creel, a lazy bum torn between his romantic soul and his animalistic instincts. Ralph Creel is a fighter, a survivor, a supremely Goodis creation who like us all, eventually gives in to life, to the Fat Blonde on the Street Corner, but not before he allows the reader to witness some moments of Grace./(I am putting this in a second time because amazon did not print my name the first time!)

Goodis supposedly sold a million copies of this pulp fiction drugstore paperback in the early fifties. Those were the "good old days" when American postwar anti-heros gave meaning to proletatian fiction in a very real way. And the working class actually read books. How so? Working class readers could identify with this kind of literature as a form of entertainment with at least one blow by blow knock-em out fight scene and penultimate gritty sex scene to match the come-on cover. It talked about their condition, hopes and despairs in an unglamorous way, spoke their diction, and didn't pull any phoney punches. We need real literature again on the mass market paperback racks besides the usual thrillers and fem-novels instead of relying on trade paperbacks for the elite.

This book was probably originally a short story, or at least the concept of a short story < the first, third, and last three chapters> . Unfortunately Goodis adds over a hundred pages of disconnected vignettes that are many times only vaguely related to each other.

Most of the book concerns four guys who are over 30, living with their parents, and perpetually unemployed because they practically never make the effort to even look for a job. The consummate losers. Ralph, the protagonist, tosses away the few opportunities that come his way for happiness or a better existence. The rest don't even try.

As a short story, it could have been an interesting observation about a certain character type. Like a Chekhov story. But can you really imagine little Vanya in a Chekhov story sitting in front of the stove for over a hundred and fifty pages. Goodis devotes a whole page to Ralph getting out of bed and whether he should urinate or just "hold it". Not my idea of a story that is interesting.

I think we've all seen too many of these pathetic creatures in public high school, or even college. Or for that matter just walk down enough streets and you'll run into them. Whether the inner city, or for that matter even the American suburbs.

If you want fiction like this, read John Steinbeck. At least he wrote in the 1930s about life in the 1930s. His characters are basically believable people, some decent, trying to find their own little happiness and dreams, and usually being overwhelmed by their environment and the force of events.

From reading the Blonde book and seeing the other titles of David Goodis books, all I can say is that his stories are just plain pathetic.