Customer Reviews

Tomato Red

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

If you read all the reviews listed, you'll see a pattern develop. Great reviews raving about the author's way with words, his ear for dialect, his ability to paint a stunning, if bleak, portrait of the 'great unwashed' that inhabit these hills that I call home. I grew up within 50 miles of Woodrell's current home, and I'm here to tell you, this is the real thing. That boy's hitting the nail on the head. But if you read further you'll find other reviews. In them, someone will say 'I wasted my money on a book about white trash. I forced myself to finish it'. I'm sorry to see reviews like that about any of Woodrell's books. I could be wrong, but I don't think he's writing books for folks who have to force themselves to finish 'em. He's writing for those of us who relish tales about no-account hillbilly 2-time losers making bad decisions and living to regret it. Consider this a warning, if you're not happy reading about small town yokels who're tired of their boring lives, disgusted with poverty yet unable to escape it, losers plotting revenge on the local gentry for stomping on their dreams, just building up steam and ready to smash the next bossman who looks at them the wrong way...stay away. Do us all a favor and just stick with something you'll enjoy. This stuff's not for you. Spend your money on something sweeter, or with more car chases or whatever you enjoy. Those among you who think you'd like to read well crafted novel's that happen to be about some of life's castaway citizens, books where every word has been considered and all the flab slashed away, c'mon in, the water's fine. Be careful, you want to watch out where you put your feet. Some yokel's been breaking bottles around here. If I catch him at it, I'm gonna skin him alive and roll him in salt. Open up that cooler and hand me one of them there liquid bread bottles, hear?

Sammy Barlach, wild and lyrical, crazy and philosophical, is automatically stopped by cops, followed around in a retail store by suspicious managers and someone you would probably cross the street to avoid. He is our narrator in this sharply satirical trailer park trash slice of life.

Sammy meets Jamalee and Jason Merridew while very unsuccessfully robbing a mansion. So far, the only thing he's managed to pilfer is a half-gallon of vodka, which he decides to drink then and there. Jamalee is a half-pint girl with hair the color "only a vegetable should have" and brother Jason is "the most beautiful boy in the Ozarks." Jamalee wants to get out of West Table, MO, and just maybe Sammy can help her. Sammy wants love or "any bunch that will have me." In Venus Holler they meet mother Sandra, a laid back, easy going, southern-to-her-fingertips whore.

Their antics are so funny, their energies and coping mechanisms so off the wall wild, I just gave in to helpless laughter. And yet, there is a sense of something preordained, sad and tragic about their existence. In ways both large and small, they are stripped of their dignity over and over again by the way they are perceived by society. "Society" ain't much in West Table, but it knows for a fact it's a world away from the likes of Sammy, Jamalee and Jason.

As the author shapes the rhythmic cadence of Sammy's story, the future is glimpsed and it's bad. It's been a long time since I have grown so fond of a character in a book. He has all the fascination of a train wreck waiting to happen. And then you shed a tear and knew it had to be.

Woodrell is marketed , at least in the UK ,as a crime writer --his British publisher the estimable No Exit Press labelling them as country noir--but the subject matter is social class normally a covert as distinct from overt theme in crime writing .In particular they treat of the dispossessed ,the bottom feeders who must lie to cover up gaps in employment history all for the sake of menial low paid work which still denies them the cornerstones of human dignity namely choice ,spontaneity and purpose.
Tomato Red is narrated by Sammy Barlach who as the boojk opens is employed as a labourer in a dog food factory and has his foreman on his back the whole time . On a drunken Friday payday ,drinking with bar room buddies and fuelled by substances both illicit and alcoholic ,not to mention a heady dose of sexual bravado he , on a dare breaks into the home of an absent wealthy family and promptly passes out.He is awoken by Jamalee--aka Tomato Red for her distinctively dyed hair and her androgynous beautiful brother Jason They are not as he assumes and they pretend wealthy inhabitants of the home but trailer park inhabitants from the most despised part of their backwater town Venus Hollow.They flee when police arrive and Sammy is taken in by the pair and their mother Bev who is unashamedly a hooker and whose calm stoic dignity is a commanding presence in the book
Jamalee dreams of escape and views Jason -poor sexually confused Jason whose hard road is to be gay in a world where this is not an easy furrow to plough.Jason as magnet for sexual blackmail is the plan and Sammy the protector.In a heartbreaking but strangely funny scene she rehearses Sammy and Jason in good manners using an antedeluvian etiquette book role playing with plastic cups instead of cut glass.
These are intruders into the world of comfortable society whose life is around of small humiliations--Sammy is followed when entering a supermarket,simply because of his looks,police harrassment is common and the greatest enemy they face is the active collusion of there fellow blue collar citizens from the next tier above .
The book is not a comfortable read but all is not gloom.The narrative voice --Sammy -is wry and sharply funny;there is compassion Steinbeck ,Farrell,Algren et al the names usually associated with blue collar fiction ,all pall beside Woodrell for his clear eyed portrait of the dirt poor .He does not sentimentalise and the resolution is spot on.Escape is possible but only at the expense of your own kind.Witness if you will the actions of crabs in a basket; when one seeks to crawl out the others combine to pull him down

There is a bitter -sweet inevitabilty here which is moving .Not for eveyone but I am moved by him as by few other writers I am moved to anger by smooth voiced television hosts building a not insubstantial fortune on the back of people like those here and then exposing them to the baying hordes

We are all human and our destination is they same ultimately.We need reminding of this and Woodrell does it brilliantly.

Daniel Woodrell has been called a "writer's writer," and Tomato Red is a good reason why. He doesn't cheat the reader with lazy or sensationalized tripe. He develops interesting characters, places them in vivid, engaging and humorous circumstances and writes lines you will repeat to your friends or to yourself to make you laugh.

Like his prior novel "Give Us A Kiss," this book features well developed characters whose quirkiness and white trash bloodlines mix to make them full of life and not a little sexual tension.

The subhead of "Kiss" was "A Country Noir." That hits the nail on the head. There's even a message to "Tomato Red" thrown in almost as a bonus because the book is so entertaining you hardly need it. But the message is as timely as it is poignant. Now I'm not going to tell you what the message is. Believe me, it's worth the time to read it yourself.

If I had to recommend one thing to take on a flight from New York to LA "Tomato Red" would be it. You could easily down it during the flight and have some time left to turn on others to it.

Enjoy!

In this novel, the second I have read by this author, Daniel Woodrell shows once again how adept he is at capturing not only the rhythms of his characters' speech, but of their very lives. Involved, as they are, in petty crime, prostitution, drug use and gut-wrenching poverty, they are nonetheless shown to be human beings -- capable of love and devotion, even feats of heroism.

The main character, Sammy Barlach, is someone you'd probably cross the street to avoid if you saw him coming. The trouble for a few of the folks in this dark novel -- both poignant and comic, by turns -- is that they DON'T see Sammy coming, or at least they don't recognize the brooding power that lies within him, built up over years and years of clinging by his fingernails to the bottom rung of the social ladder.

Sammy finds himself involved with -- and subsequently taken in by -- two siblings and their mother. Jamalee and her brother Jason are poor but engaging -- they have dreams of getting out of the Venus Holler section of West Table, MO. They have a plan, and now it involves Sammy. Their mother, Bev, described aptly on the inside jacket, 'can turn a trick as easily as she can roll a joint'. Jamalee and Jason abhor (no homonymic pun intended) her prostituional lifestyle -- but at the same time that they resent her for this, they love her, and ache for what she has become.

Jason is a handsome young man -- the female customers at the hair salon where he is apprenticed swoon over him. His sister tells Sammy that 'grown women in the grocery store throw their panties at him with their numbers written on them in lipstick'. Jason's major difficulty in fitting in with his small community is that he happens to be gay -- a lifestyle not embraced by small-town Southerners, to say the least. At seventeen, it is a fact of his life with which he is still wrestling -- and it is painful to watch, as it must be for those who go through it in life. How can he be true to himself and somehow manage to suffer the slings and arrows hurled at him by an intolerant society?

The novel's action builds well to an almost unbearable pitch -- the other Woodrell novel I've read, THE DEATH OF SWEET MISTER, is equally gripping. Sammy narrates the story very effectively -- his phrasing and turns of speech are jewel-like -- and for an uneducated petty criminal with few social graces, he's a pretty amazing philosopher.

The book's finale is as heartbreaking as it is inevitable -- but this is definitely a journey I can recommend. Woodrell is a master -- I'm going to read everything by him I can find.

This is a superbly written book! The prose is at times breathtaking and the plot, while certainly quirky, was fascinating. A book that you will want to re-read. This guy REALLY has a way with words. Buy it and savor it.

This may be one of those rare cases (for me, at least) where the story is less important than the writing (which is as tense and immediate as a cocked mousetrap). Daniel Woodrell is a master of language, and in Tomato Red, uses it to create a sense of place, a sense of "being there" so compelling that I felt the steam rising off my brain. I can't help but share the opening paragraph of Chapter 14:

Sometimes nature has this look where you want to hoot and shout accusations because the look seems so unbelievable, an obvious fake. I study these looks for the brief reward of them, and that night nature tossed me such a look. Rain clouds, all dark and muttering, were mobbing up out west, but long finger bones of sunlight showed through and played the range of colors like a range of musical notes, making a tune of colors from pink to plum and back to yellow all across the rim of the world.

You don't need me to tell you anything about the story, you just need to know that you will be swept away by Mr. Woodrell's writing. I read this slim book until I was done, because I could do nothing else. No one has ever written better than this.

Combine the characters of William Faulkner, the atmospheres of Cormac McCarthy, and the mind bending metaphors of Tom Robbins...these will give a flavor of Daniel Woodrell. "Tomato Red" gave me an insight into a world I was not born to and hope never to inhabit; the rural American South chronic underclass. People you may see driving in an old beat up car, or standing on a corner in a small southern town, but hope never to meet in a dark alley. You probably won't like these people, but you will be fascinated by their stories and will better understand their self-destructive behavior. Main character and small time low-life Sammy Barlach has the soul of a poet, even if his creative muse is expressed with breaking and entering. I will read more of Mr. Woodrell, for sure.

...and the moral of the story is that home is where they have to let you in. Sammy's looking for home. Who doesn't want a place to belong? The search, this longing for "my people" is primal. Some of us find them, some of us don't. Sometimes it's family, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it's a good thing when we find them, sometimes not. Some of us search for this connection without being fully aware that we're doing so. E.B. White's character in The Door says, "My heart has followed all my days, something it cannot name." Sammy names his heart's desire... 'a bunch that'll have me'. <i>I wasn't going to care much for being lonely again, if that's what was coming. That hadn't been said-get out-it hadn't come to that yet, but I could see the same calamity that always hounded me hunkered at the edge of the campfire light, yawning and picking it's teeth, lurking. In my heart, you see, I knew I could live here. I didn't want to leave, or be left, either.</i>

Where did Sammy come from? Details of his life before Tomato Red took over are sketchy. He tells Jamalee, "My mom left town just before I was born" and when Jamalee cajoles him to say something good about his own mother he says, "She's not around anymore. That's a good thing." He gives us a barely a glimpse of the small Arkansas town he came from and lets us guess at the horrors there and its ultimate disappointment for him: There was no bunch there that would have him. So Sammy amputates his past like a diseased limb and lives in the present and in his quest for home, a place and people to belong to. He doesn't want to anticipate the frightening future. He's not going anywhere in particular and he knows it. He vaguely envisions ending up in prison but isn't overly concerned by the thought. Maybe that's the last ditch resort to a place to belong.

The Merridew family of Venus Holler, through a warped sequence of events, take Sammy in. Ambitious Jamalee, aka Tomato Red, threatens to steal Sammy's heart but shows little in the way of a heart to offer in return. Her beautiful brother, Jason, seems to be the only thing Jamalee is capable of loving, and even Jason is fodder for her ambition. Jamalee, the sister, flawed beyond redemption and Jason, tragically beautiful, play out their roles in the town that assigned them their fate the day they were born, and in the end, we see it could have ended no other way.

I know I must have read a book as beautifully written as Tomato Red, and I have read books with more satisfying plots and climaxes, but just now in the afterglow of this little treasure, I can't remember what they were. This is a small book packed full of prose that flows, descriptions of feelings I've sensed and been unable to articulate, and emotions so strong they grabbed me by the throat and refused to let go. It's one of the few books I'm destined to read again and again, sighing all the while, "Lord, I wish I'd written that."

I sensed the ending and was not disappointed or surprised. Woodrell remained true to his characters and let them play their drama out to the end without obtrusive interferrence. This, my friends, is a perfect example of what the wise ones tell those of us who write: Be true to the characters and let them be true to themselves.

In Tomato Red, Daniel Woodrell knows of where pre-destiny is set. Genetic reception, one's geographical point of entry/nourishment, and the expectations of those who know these things about you: parents, friends, teachers and those who live on the fringe and observe you from their vantage point are all parts of the final resting place of one's existence and soul. Sometimes, one escapes the doldrums of such whitetrash existence and pre-determined endings; but in Jamalee's case, tragedy follows her escape like the dust which follows her bus. A top-knotch read for anyone interested in excellent wordsmithing.