The Maid’s Version by Daniel Woodrell
My rating: 4/5 cats
“Have to read a whole goddam novel about baseball, only it’s not really about baseball, see, it’s about sad-assed stuff I already know all I need to know about, but there will be a test.”
and that’s the foundation of it, right? woodrell’s characters inhabit their world, and we are all just tourists, reading it to be entertained by his stories of these resolute downtrodden folks in their sad-assed circumstances, while for them, it is just life. and they have already been tested. we require the window dressing of, say, baseball in order to understand what they have learned from life.
but he neverever writes window dressing. he is always the opposite – clear, stripped-down windows showing us stark and unsung characters, knowing shit we only think we know.
woodrell is an astonishingly good writer, and the four stars cats i gave this book shouldn’t be any indication of its lacking anything at all. my star cat-ratings are inconsistent and personal, and a four here only means that there are books of his i have liked better. for many people, this would be a five-starcat read, no question.
phew, now that that’s out of the way.
this is a novel about a mysterious explosion at a dancehall in missouri in 1929 that killed 42 people. among the dead is ruby, the beautiful and free-spirited younger sister of alma degeer dunahew, now the grandmother of ten-year-old alek, the primary narrator, who tells him what she knows of the story when he comes to live with her for a summer in 1965. thirty-six years after the events, she still has suspicions about the cause of the explosion, and her sister’s role in it; suspicions which have cost her dearly throughout her long life.
decades after that summer, at an eerie memorial ceremony at the monument to those who died in the explosion, alek is encouraged, finally, to divulge what alma told him all those years ago.
more than crime fiction, more than the answer to a question, this is a celebration of lives cut off too soon. it is a mosaic-character study, where the voices of many of the soon-to-be-dead commingle to create a portrait of a small town with its various secrets and relationships and its hopes and crimes and resentments. it is not exactly a novel-in-stories, but it frequently reads like one. some characters are given a lot of space to tell their story, and some only appear for a two-page chapter. but they all contribute to the interlocking narrative not necessarily because they have particular relevance to the explosion itself, but because they existed. they died. they are part of the story, if not its resolution.
and that’s what is so great about woodrell. in 165 pages, he gives us this huge chorus of story-quilt pieces that satisfies all the criteria of a mystery novel, but also provides so much additional tonal substance that a traditional mystery novelist would have omitted in order to make everything mean something, as unrealistic and blatantly constructed as that is. but this means more, overall. you aren’t pleased at the end with the structure of the puzzle, the foreshadowing you didn’t note at the time, the triumphant reveal by the brilliant detective. there isn’t any triumph here. there isn’t, in the real world. there are just a bunch of sad-assed circumstances and a lot of voices that never get heard. and these are the very voices woodrell always celebrates so well and so tastefully.
let’s say four-and-a-half…
