Reviewed in conjunction with La DouleurSometimes you read a book that makes you feel ashamed of your life, every time you thought you were unlucky or that you deserve more or that you should get more. Whatever you have suffered, however genuine it be, suddenly becomes as nothing, its place clearly fixed in the universe as the measliest dot the world ever has seen. Roughneck does that. It describes a portion of his life in the pared down, straightforward way Thompson tells all his stories. Nothing is oversized, filled with extra words so that you can feel like you are getting more than you paid for. You are, of course. But not in word count. As is so often the case, the small story about a few, packs so much more punch than big numbers. This one starts before the Great Depression and takes us through that period. Not that I should be calling it a story. I groaned when I realised I’d picked up an autobiography, not a novel. Live life, don’t read about others, p-llllease. But I was too mean not to read it, serves me right for not looking carefully when I bought it. And before two pages were up I was goggle-eyed, gaping-mouthed hooked.The man’s a genius. He can even make biography bearable. I’m not going to review this, for the simple reason that I’m not worthy too. The human suffering he writes about, what Americans did to Americans, even white Americans to white Americans, would be demeaned by anything I said about it. I don’t think I ever realised so clearly the extent to which poverty and wealth create the same barriers, the same hate as race or religion, maybe even worse. Watching the way wealthy Americans treated those they were exploiting in this period made my stomach churn. I think that’s the most incredible aspect of it. It is so easy to understand poor people might hate rich. But this book brings home the other side of this and it is truly ghastly to watch.This is a wildy entertaining book, but it is about people who were rich, watching, exploiting and being despicable to their poor neighbours. It is about people unnecessarily half starving, living in the most desperate circumstances and heart in mouth hoping they pull through. It makes you ashamed to be human.So I thought.But then, I hadn’t picked up La Douleur yet.‘Shit.’ That is what I did say out loud, irritated when I picked this up, the very next book after Roughneck. Another hasty purchase, another %$^#$ autobiography. A slightly wanky one, if it comes to that, I felt as I started it – after the plain matteroffactness of Thompson, Duras seemed on the hysterically dramatic side.Then again, who wouldn’t be? Thompson writes about the half starved. Duras writes of the 95% starved. I don’t know how to put that. People who are literally skin and bones as they come back, those few who do, from the camps of Nazi Germany, people who are so close to death that food is going to kill them as surely as lack of it will, people whose skeletons can’t bear the tiny weight on them. I have no way of describing the horrors recorded here and to quote bits and pieces would seem plain disrespectful.I did need some pages to adjust to the girly, introspective way Duras sets out her story here, but then, it was never supposed to be a story, not like that. It was what she wrote at the time for herself, trying to hang on to what was left of her sanity as she waited for her husband to come back during the period in which the prisoners were set free from the Nazi camps. She has some moments of marvelous acidity as she describes how some of the French take advantage of the new political situation. She is no friend of de Gaulle, who sounds like a right creep the way she tells it.It turned out that being ashamed of America in the Depression wasn’t the half of it.Lately I seem to keep on – completely coincidentally – reading books that pair each other in some significant way and here again, it’s happened. It’s an odd request, but I’m making it. These books go together. Get them and read them back to back. It’ll be totally worth it, I promise!
A kind of memoir told in a series of essays ("Chapters") which amount to various recollections from his early life. Some are funny and many are sad. Most of them are full of amusing characters of the low rent Dickens style. A few favorites: - the boss who "looked like a demon and talked like a baby" who was always too drunk to stand up, so he'd taken to just turning around in his office chair and pissing out the window rather than go to the restroom. But he also a genius accountant. So good that the company could not afford to consider firing him.- the manager at the collection company/store he worked at who reached a kind of epiphany about how horrible what they were doing was and spent the rest of his time there trying to argue his way out of it as the company went to ruins bit by bit and eventually closed.- the cops who grab him up right as he jumps off a train in Oklahoma City when he was a depression-era hobo. He'd been run out of town after town for being a bum, but these cops didn't arrest him or drive him out of town. They took to him directly to a soup kitchen for a meal, a shelter for a bath and a shave and let him sleep in the courthouse.In addition to interesting characters is a generally compelling portrait of the depression on the ground level. The overall weakest of the Thompson books I've read so far, it can be generally refreshing to hear stories from the old days when writers were a lot like the Blues Men of old, desperate and screwed on a level so basic that no amount of effort will ever begin to put a dent in your troubles. You buy this for those stories, for the stories Thompson actually lived. Ultimately, even more than it's a series of stories about Jim Thompson's life, the book ends up being a portrait of the hard life, where no one cares and nothing good happens to anyone. Being good is punished by constant hardship. Every opportunity is a disaster in disguise. But then, Jim Thompson was always the master of the unreliable narrator. Is this really any different?
What do You think about Roughneck (2014)?
This was one of the books I read for the Let's Talk About It book group "Oklahoma--the Thirties." I wasn't excited at all about the book and was glad it was short. Strangely enough, I liked it. Maybe because I wasn't expecting to. Thompson was a very hardscrabble writer living in the time of the Depression. He took any job he could for survival and most of them were just shy of legal and he stayed one step ahead of the law. This is a series of short stories about those days before his first novel was published. It wasn't an uplifting read, but every time I almost gave up on him, something happened to redeem him.
—Jan Cole
Roughneck, the follow-up to Thompson's Bad Boy (1953), picks up where the first chunk of his autobiography left off by tracing the author's path from hard-scrabble day laborer to paid writer. And just like Bad Boy, Roughneck takes an anecdotal approach, with each chapter acting as a slightly exaggerated Grandpa Simpson-esque tale about getting by during The Great Depression. While some of these stories stretch the limits of credulity, Thompson portrays himself as a compassionate, understanding man who nearly kills himself on a daily basis (with labor and alcohol) just to feed his family -- which stands in stark contrast to the cynical, world-weary tone he usually takes in his novels. Roughneck ends abruptly with the death of Thompson's father, which doesn't give this collection of stories a satisfying ending, but this stopping point provides some insight into just how much this event haunted him (his father died in a sanitarium while Jim was on a bender). Some of the book's stories are hit and miss -- Thompson goes into excessive detail about oil well digging before realizing his audience might not know anything about it -- but Roughneck still shows how much of Thompson's life informed his actual work. I'll be reading Robert Polito's Savage Art next to see how much of Thompson's self-assessment matches up with the actual truth.
—Bob Mackey
One of my weekly enjoyments is book shopping through the local thrift stores. Every now and then, I will find something good. I haven't found much to sell on Ebay; the competition for those finds are fierce. But it can be rewarding to locate some dusty paperback you've always wanted to read, just never had the time, money or inclination. I really need to actually pull the books out of the pile and start reading The Harrad Experiment, The Sterile Cuckoo, or Death Turns A Smile before they disintegrate.I've always been fan of noir writer Jim Thompson. He came of age in the 1920's and went through the great depression, trying to survive as a writer. Over-looked in his lifetime, Thompson's fame would increase after he died in the early 1970's. Which just goes to show that the best way to make it as a writer is to drop dead. He cranked out a mountain of detective and crime novels for a small paperback company in the 1950's. Some of them, such as The Getaway, were later filmed for the big screen.Thompson's world was the dry plains of Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas. His characters are corrupt politicians, field tramps, hit men, and desperate people. No one ever gets out intact from a Thompson book, survival is the most they can desire. The Killer Inside Me is narrated by a small town sheriff, who just happens to be a cunning psychotic. The bank robbers of the The Getaway eventually discover there are worse fates than being captured by the law.Roughneck is the second volume of an autobiography. Thompson wrote this one about his adult years. It begins with him in a broken down car trying to take his mother and sister to a relative's house in Oklahoma, his dad's latest oil well schemes having gone bust. The book is depressing, but shows you how someone can survive under the most desperate conditions. Thompson devotes a few chapters to working as bill collector and lets the reader in the trade's secrets.Not the most uplifting book you can read, but a keen view into the world of the depression-era Southwest.
—Tim Mayer
