The Thicket by Joe R. Lansdale
My rating: 4/5 cats
another great opening to a book:
I didn’t suspect the day Grandfather came out and got me and my sister, Lula, and hauled us off toward the ferry that I’d soon end up with worse things happening than had already come upon us or that I’d take up with a gun-shooting dwarf, the son of a slave, and a big angry hog, let alone find true love and kill someone, but that’s exactly how it was.
a great opening, but one that worried me nonetheless, seeming as it did to suffer from some of the qualities of folksiness and plucky teen-narrator that i wasn’t enamored with in Edge of Dark Water.
but while there were certainly some “fun with similes” attempts that strained my patience a bit:
–She was so damn ugly she would have to sneak up on a biscuit and force it to be eaten with the point of a gun.
–Daddy always said Grandpa was so tight that when he blinked the skin on his pecker rolled back.
etc, etc.
this time, there were more that actually worked for me, also involving faces, oddly:
–that face, which was like a hatchet to the soul.
and:
–he had a face that was like a sack full of burdens.
so, about half of the time, i wasn’t wincing at the flourishes. which is a better percentage than before.
our young narrator is as morally rigid as mattie ross in True Grit; as naive and stubborn and convinced that morality and decency will win the day. and as about to learn a hard lesson.
finding himself suddenly orphaned in east texas after smallpox kills his parents, 16-year-old jack parker and his younger sister lula are on their way to live in kansas with their aunt, whom they have never met. before they can make it across the river, their grandfather-escort is murdered and lula is taken by a band of bank-robbers and general ne’er do wells.
jack is determined to get lula back, and joins forces with the aforementioned dwarf, son-of-slave, and hog. they will later be joined by a sheriff and a whore. On the way to hunt down the criminals, jack repeatedly states that he does not want the men killed; he just wants his sister back, and he knows that this does not have to end in bloodshed. his fellow-companions have seen a bit more of the world’s workings, and treat him like a curiosity, begrudgingly respecting his idealism, but knowing how this is all going to end.
“You are so definite, kid. Seldom right, but always certain.”
along the way, encounter after encounter shows jack that the world doesn’t play by “love thy neighbor” rules and might not recognize good intentions and turning of cheek. he learns from his new friends, and hears their life’s philosophies in the quiet hours:
Life isn’t just black or white, here or there; it’s got some mud in it, and we’re some of the mud.
and
Just a year ago I kept thinking this ain’t fair, the way things have turned out for me. Then it come to me clean as spring rain. Life is just what it is, and it ain’t fair at all.”
and through all the bloodshed and frustration that things are not turning out as he had planned, jack hardens a little with every page, adapting his own morality to take in the realities he is discovering at every turn, but resentful of the world’s cruelty.
I wished then that I was wasn’t a man at all but a hawk, something with some kind of integrity about what it killed, that did it for food or survival, not for sport or revenge or to satisfy something rotten inside.
it is a very bloody book. and also a very funny book. and the lessons are hard-won, and all the plucky little folksyisms are worn down to hard little nubs by the end of jack’s moral awakening. and it earns all of it. i really liked this book, and it has re-ignited my interest in lansdale. a definite should-read for most of you…
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