Tomato Red

The hero of Daniel Woodrell's Tomato Red is the most endearingly out-of-control loser you're likely to meet. Sammy Barlach looks like a person "who should in any circumstances be considered a suspect"; clerks follow him through the supermarket when he shops, and the police pull him over simply from habit. But in spite of his looks, Sammy only wants to be loved, even if it's just by "the bunch that would have me"--and in the hardscrabble world of West Table, Missouri, that's a bunch you wouldn't necessarily want to meet. The novel begins with a heady Methedrine rush, as Sammy celebrates payday by letting himself be talked into robbing a nearby mansion. Even when his newfound friends disappear as he's breaking in, he persists: "You might think I should've quit on the burglary right there, but I just love people, I guess, and didn't." The break-in leads Sammy into an unlikely alliance with the Merridew family: Jamalee and Jason and their mother Bev, a prostitute in the town's ironically named Venus Holler. Flame-haired Jamalee dreams constantly of a different kind of life, and she plans on using Jason's extraordinary beauty as her ticket out of West Table. Jason, however, seems to be shaping up as what Sammy calls "country queer"--which, as Sammy observes, "ain't the easiest walk to take amongst your throng of fellow humankind." Unfortunately for Jamalee, Woodrell's Ozarks is a place that rewards ambition with disaster. Here as in his five previous "country noir " novels, Woodrell writes with a keen understanding of class and a barely contained sense of rage. The residents of West Table's trailer parks and shotgun shacks share Sammy's sense of limited possibilities. " I ain't shit! I ain't shit! shouts your brain," Sammy thinks while wandering around the mansion, "and this place proves the point." Even when Jason sticks up for his own family, the way he does so is heartbreaking: "This expression of utter frankness takes over Jason's beautiful face, and he says, 'I don't think we're the lowest scum in town.' He didn't argue that we weren't scum, just disputed our position on the depth chart." With her mildewing etiquette guides and grandiose plans, Jamalee is the only character who doesn't share their sense of defeat, and she's the only one who, in the end, gets away--though she leaves behind her a trail of betrayal and heartache. By the time the novel's final tragedy rolls around, it seems both senseless and inevitable, as tragedies do in real life. Told in a voice that crackles with energy and wit, Tomato Red is sharp, funny, and more importantly, true. --Mary Park From Publishers Weekly "You're no angel, you know how this stuff comes to happen: Friday is payday and it's been a gray day sogged by slow ugly rain and you seek company in your gloom...." So begins the bravura first paragraph of Woodrell's sixth novel (after Give Us a Kiss). As readers of Woodrell's previous fiction will expect, we are in the Ozarks?in West Table, Mo., to be specific. Sammy Barlach, our narrator, is a case?at the moment, he's employed in the dog food industry, but he's just met a girl "with teeth the size of shoe-peg corn" who's well supplied with crank and, toward the end of their weekend spree, suggests that they rob a mansion whose owners are (notoriously) on vacation. In the course of executing this plan, Sammy meets fellow burglars Jamalee and Jason Meridew?a sister and brother pair from Venus Hollow who break into wealthy houses in order to try on clothes and make believe they are rich. Jamalee, however, plans to make it big by using her brother's remarkable looks to seduce, then blackmail, the wives of the rich. (The hitch: Jason's tenuous, possibly nonexistent, interest in hetero sex.) Meanwhile, Bev Meridew, their mother, supports herself as a freelance goodtime girl and occasional snitch. Sammy moves in with this incestuous group as Jamalee's idea of muscle until even he can't protect them or their dreams from the nastier elements of Venus Hollow. The dialogue and characters are what keeps this awkwardly plotted little number plugging along. Woodrell isn't interested in Li'l Abner cutouts. These figures are all bluff and sorrow, and Woodrell succeeds in giving their misfit poetry a genuine C&W resonance that lingers beyond the last page. (Aug.) FYI: Ang Lee is currently directing a movie from Woe to Live On, Woodrell's second novel.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Woodrell (Give Us a Kiss: A Country Noir, Holt, 1996) has no quit in him. The more he writes, the more you feel for the characters, the sense of place, and the extraordinary stories of hopes, dreams, and just plain living. The journey back to West Table, MO, introduces us to Jamalee, Jason, and Bev Merridew. Each one is quirky and damaged by life as Ozark white trash. Hopes for escape are pinned on Sammy Barlach, who has never had much more pinned on him than misdemeanors. Woodrell's language is a lyrical blend of comic wit and redneck twang. His vast life experience brings a fresh, poignant look at Appalachian people. Keep 'em coming!?Shannon Williams Haddock, Bellsouth Corporate Lib. & Business Research Ctr., Birmingham, ALCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist "Her head looked like an heirloom tomato after a rough, scrubbing cloudburst. If ever I could possess a '65 Mustang, four-speed rag top, I'd want it to be the color of her hair." So says Sammy Barlach, a country boy with a nose for trouble and a rap sheet to match, about Jamalee Merridew, who thinks she's found the way out of Venus Holler, the low-life side of West Table, Missouri. Readers of Woodrell's superb Give Us a Kiss (1996) know where we're heading here: deep into the heart of country noir--Erskine Caldwell with a double shot of irony. Jamalee and her brother, Jason, who just may be the prettiest human, man or woman, in the Ozarks, want out of town fast ("This map starts to get really interesting about a state and a half from here"), but Jason doesn't seem to have the makings of a stud-for-hire (at least not if women are involved), so Jam comes up with Plan B: get Sammy to steal something from someone. Sammy's along for the ride, content to do his losing in as many different ways as possible. Nobody gets just what they want, of course, but everybody gets something a little different than what they expect, even Sammy, who always expects the worst. Woodrell's rare genius as a writer is playing against the odds and winning: not only does he make us see the poetry in the beat-up souls of Ozark rednecks, whose only other regular gig in today's entertainment world is on The Jerry Springer Show, he also writes some of the funniest, most musical, most marvelously double-edged prose being written by anyone on any side of town, in any genre, high or low. Take Elmore Leonard's grit, Barry Gifford's wild heart, James Crumley's mean streak, and--stay with me here--a wisp of Truman Capote's lyricism, and you're ready to visit the Ozarks, Woodrell style. Bill Ott From Kirkus Reviews Woodrells second book, Woe to Live On (1987), is being filmed by Ang Lee, and the author seems to have pitched this, his sixth low-down and dirty novel, to the big screen: his no-account characters and their dumb-as-a-stump doings have that over-the-top quality that transfers neatly to the movies; and his downbeat ending, with its teenaged femme fatale, is pure Hollywood noir. None of which is to say that here is inferior Woodrell. His singular voice still captures the redneck poetry of everyday peckerwood speech, and his tough-guy posturings reveal themselves as empty gestures. Add to that a new sense of class conflict as it plays itself out in semirural Missouri. Woodrells loser narrator, 24-year-old Sammy Barlach, comes from Blue Knee, Arkansas, an hour and a tall beer to the Delta side of Little Rock. A self-described cranked-out dipshit, Sammy cant hold a job or a woman and soon falls into the nutsy actin of two other, less lumpy lumpen proles who were also born shoved to the margins of the world. Nineteen-year-old Jamalee Merridew, with the tomato-red hair celebrated in the title, hopes to escape the grind of low living by exploiting the phenomenal beauty of her younger brother, Jason, a budding beautician whose uncertain sexuality renders his sisters blackmail scheme moot. The siblings unmarried mother, Bev, a Barbie who has gone to seed on roadhouse whiskey and pan-fried chicken, supports her clan on her back. Jamalee meanwhile studies etiquette and dreams of living high. When her plans take a downward turn, with brutal consequences, Sammyhimself craving to be a herojust proves the truth of his down-home Hobbesianism: life is glum and grim and nasty. Woodrells sorry country folk live fast and learn slow, as Jamalee puts it, and their tale provides lots of low comedyand no small amount of pathos. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. "Dan Woodrell does for the Ozarks what Raymond Chandler did for Los Angeles." --Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times"Dan Woodrell can tell me stories any old time. He can come to my house, pull up a chair on the porch, pour himself a long drink of whatever it is he's fond of, scratch my dog between the ears and let fly. I don't know that I'll let him around my wife and daughter, though, unless he's closely supervised."--Pinckney Benedict, Washington Post"Give Us a Kiss is a keeper. One of those choice, quirky, written pieces that sometimes makes you whistle because it is so good."--Bill Brashler, Chicago Tribune"Fast action, a great deal of mayhem and a soup?on of sex. A good read, with salty dialogue, tough-guy prose, quick-sketched characters and sharp, terse imagery."--Robert Houston, The New York Times Book Review Dan Woodrell is the author of five previous novels: Under the Bright Lights, Woe to Live On (to be filmed by director Ang Lee, adapted by James Shamus), Muscle for the Wing, The Ones You Do, and Give Us a Kiss--a New York Times Notable Book for 1996. He lives in Missouri. From The Washington Post ...Woodrell's marvelous trick to hook readers with a story so fun you can't help but empathize with the unsavory ... a shimmering novel, eminently readable and rich with insight. Read more