Customer Reviews

Night People (Gifford, Barry)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a brilliant web of intertwining stories that left me wishing I could meet it's characters for coffee. Barry Gifford must be the best author in the world right now. His style is unmatched, and his subject matter is great. Gifford makes the strange commonplace while his characters try to tether themselves to reality. A beautiful book!

More than any other writer I can think of, Barry Gifford understand the impact of the written word. He is able to create several memorable characters in just over two hundred pages, with chapters lasting no more than a few pages each. Ten years have passed since I first read this book, but its characters are still etched in my mind. In a perfect world Barry Gifford would be as famous as Elmore Leonard, instead Gifford is criminally underrated.

David Lynch was supposed to make a film adaptation of this book. Too bad he didn't. The book's twisty narrative would have revolutionized cinema as much as Pulp Fiction did.

If there is one thing I love about Barry,it's his talent for creating original offbeat characters.This book is fun.It isn't meant to be taken too seriously.Therefore the sensible thing to do is not take it seriously.Just read it and have a good time.That's what I did.

Here's the opening of Night People by Barry Gifford:

"Big Betty Stalcup kissed Miss Cutie Early on the right earlob as Cutie drove, tickling her, causing her to swerve the black Dodge Monaco toward the right as she scratched her head."

What's in a name? Page after page of Night People, I marvelled at the names Barry Gifford came up for characters and places. Like the story he told, the names were over the top and at the same time a perfect distillation of each character. Night People is a wonderful book in many ways, but here are three things I learned from Barry Gifford about the art of naming.

A colorful name, like a good hook, makes us want to know more.

Who is Big Betty Stalcup? Cutie Early? Where are they going in the black Dodge Monaco? Big Betty Stalcup connotes a larger than life character and together with the name Cutie Early I am drawn into a larger than life story, possibly a satire, and I am pretty sure the story isn't going to be about the breakup of a married couple living in Connecticut.

A evocative name is itself a shorthand character description.

Like concrete, sensory description, a colorful name, tells us a lot using very little.
A good name suggests what the person looks like, his or her nationality, profession, and/or a key personality trait.

Here are some other character names in Night People:

Can you guess from the list below, who is a recent divorcee? A lawyer? A police deputy? What else might you surmise from the names?


Rollo Lamar
Big Betty Stalcup
Bobby Dean Baker
Ernesto and Dagoberto Reyes
Bosco Bruillard
Vernon Duke Douglas
Pearline Nail
Blackie Lala
DeLeon, Felda, Birdie, Dawn, Tequesta, Waldo
Feo Lengua
Mayo and Hilda Sapp
Desoto Sturgis

A well-chosen name can conjure a world into being.

Here are some names of places in Night People:

Fort Sumatra Detention Center for Wayward Women
The Saturn Bar
Swindle Ironworks
Alligator Point
Egypt City
Hernando Cortés Motor Court
Checkerboard Chuckie's Change of Heart Bar
Arabi
Little Saigon
Chalmette
Club Spasm
Jasper Pasco's Fishin' Pier and Grocery

Names locate us geographically and culturally. Think of the different street names in the places you've lived. Names go along way towards describing the setting in a story. You can also use the connotations associated with certain names to create an alternate fictional reality. For example, Egypt City to my knowledge, doesn't exist, but to me it connotes names like Memphis and Athens -- and helps me to imagine a city in the southern part of the U.S., probably somewhere between Louisiana and Florida. (especially when included with names like Alligator Point and Chalmette).

A well chosen name can hook the reader, evoke a character, conjure a world. As Barry Gifford writes "The world is really wild at heart and weird on top." (Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula). The names, as well as Gifford's prose go a long way towards capturing that wild, weird, wondrous world. It's definitely a book worth reading.

Beyond any praise or any listing of characters, this novel has a certain gritty flavor that stays in your mouth (brain) for a long time.
Noir, beat, crime, love, dogmatic...A full metal jacket bullet shot rigth trough your left eye ball.

Ooooooooo, this book, this book man. Dirty, dirty, dirty! This book had it all. Lesbians. Incest. People who have sex for money. Dirty, dirty, dirty.

But it was the clean kind of dirty.

It was very good.