The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do (58 page)

MULHOLLAND BOOKS

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THE BAYOU TRILOGY

Under the Bright Lights

Muscle for the Wing

The Ones You Do

by

D
ANIEL
W
OODRELL

A conversation with Daniel Woodrell

It’s been almost twenty-five years since
Under the Bright Lights
was first published, and twenty years since the publication of
The Ones You Do.
What was it like to revisit the trilogy after so many years? Did the re-publication process stir any fond memories from the early years of your career as a novelist?

I do not read my own old novels much. Once in a while there will be a reason to search one, primarily when I want to be sure I am not repeating myself. I had great fun writing all three of these novels, gave them all I had to give, and rereading them I find myself pretty happy with what came out of the ol’ ink pen.

The lively Cajun town of St. Bruno, with its changing ethnic makeup, abundance of crime, and systemic corruption at the local level, is a fictional bayou town entirely of your own creation. What was it like to invent a city from the ground up? Is there a specific reason you later decided to make the switch to setting your novels in the Ozarks?

I did not expect myself to write Ozark novels when I started. I’ve lived quite a few places under various circumstances, and wanted to create a setting that would allow me to explore anything that appealed to me without any concerns about puny ol’ conventional reality. The purely invented scenes are often the best. I want my writing to start in realism, but not to end up as mere realism. The switch to the Ozarks was not something I anticipated—I am very well aware of how disinterested the country as a whole is in places like this, so I knew it would mean taking a vow of poverty, but this is what started coming out, and I have kept on with it.

When you look back on the trilogy, do you note any stylistic differences among the three novels that surprise you? Are there any elements or attributes of these novels that strike you as stepping stones toward the writer you are now?

A lot of verve and energy are apparent. My love for pulp and for other forms of fiction seems obvious on every page. I was and am much taken with the sort of language that can hold high and low expression in the same sentence. Rough and refined. Oddly, I see more scenes of a faintly or strongly autobiographical nature in these early novels than I remember.

If you had to pick one favorite scene or moment from all three of the Rene Shade novels, what would it be, and why?

When Rene and Nicole have oral sex in a wading pool in the backyard.

Your most recent novel, Winter’s Bone, was made into a motion picture directed by Debra Grank that was a critical success, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, earned five Academy Award nominations, and has become something of a cult favorite. What did you think of the production, and to what extent were you consulted? Grank has mentioned in interviews that you showed the crew locations that had inspired you in helping them set the film.

The film came out very well. Awards out the wazoo. I think it telling that our culture will award and award a film that faithfully sticks to the book, but the book was completely left out of the awards and benedictions. I did show the film folks around, extended every courtesy, took them on the river, introduced them to the terrain and people, fed them when they showed up unexpectedly and hungry (fed them my own supper, in fact), etc.

You left high school to join the Marine Corps and ultimately ended up with an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. What led you from point A to point B?

I wrote all the time and had already been doing nothing else much for five years before Iowa. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop was the only program to which I applied, and, quirk of quirks, I was admitted. A couple of faculty members would later loudly regret that I had been admitted, but I got through and learned what I needed to know.

Your style has been described as “southern,” “gothic,” “country noir,” or all three. If you had to classify yourself, where would you say you fit?

All labels are a form of prejudice—so said Chekhov, and, as usual, he knew what he was talking about. “Regional,” “gothic,” “noir,” “mystery” are all terms meant to segregate us from a true evaluation—no need for the literary world to even look at the work, since you are subliterary by category, and the categories are very dumbly applied in many cases.

What books, music, and art inspire you? What are you reading and listening to now?

I still pay close attention to McGuane, Lehane, Hemingway, Edna O’Brien, Bruen, and Faulkner and Flannery. I read a lot of poetry, Kinnell, Merwin, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Vallejo, Trakl, many others. I love Cézanne, Charles Burchfield, Chaim Soutine, and on many days Bonnard. Munch and van Gogh are so obviously an influence I usually forget to mention them, same with Twain. I like the Drive-By Truckers, Pieta Brown, Bo Ramsey and Greg Brown, Leona Naess, Malcolm Holcombe, and too many others.

Questions and topics for discussion

Under the Bright Lights

1.
Under the Bright Lights
opens with the quote from prizefighter Joe Frazier: “If you cheated on [your preparation] in the dark of the morning, well, you’re going to get found out now under the bright lights.” How does this epigraph prefigure the story to come? What do you make of Rene Shade’s years as a semiprofessional boxer? Why is it, as Shade remarks, that nobody remembers seeing the fights he won?

2. The Shade brothers—hard-drinking policeman and former boxer Rene, bartender to criminals and lowlifes Tip, and criminal prosecutor Francois, all started in the same broken home in a bad neighborhood of St. Bruno and ended up on different paths and with different positions in the social hierarchy. What do you think each of the three brothers represents in their varying approaches to lawfulness, morality, and social standing?

3. Alvin Rankin, the murdered African American city councilman, is described as a man who could have been the first black mayor of St. Bruno if his life had not been cut short. Given the motives for his murder, what does his death signify? What would his continued ascension have symbolized?

4. The denizens of St. Bruno are reluctant to disclose any information, however minor, to Rene or any part of the police force.
Why? Considering Woodrell’s representation of St. Bruno’s legal system and law enforcement, does it do them more harm or good not to trust the system to work on their behalf?

5. Many of the characters in
Under the Bright Lights
make racially disparaging comments, or bemoan the changing racial profile of St. Bruno. What do you make of all this overt racial tension? What correlation, if any, do you think race has with the crimes depicted?

6.
Under the Bright Lights
closes in a moment of violence and tenderness among brothers Rene and Tip. Does Woodrell’s novel posit that both impulses can coexist among family? Among men? Or must one eventually win out over the other?

Muscle for the Wing

1.
Muscle for the Wing
invokes issues of class in its very first sentence, as Emil Jadick pushes himself shotgun-first through the door of the Hushed Hill Country Club to avoid the possibility of “a snub.” Does class play a significant role throughout the novel? If so, to what end?

2. Fire-topped Wand Bone Bouvier is the only associate of the Wing to survive the events depicted in
Muscle for the Wing.
Considering the age (sixteen years old) at which romance brought her into close contact with a life of crime, do you consider her a victim of the men who worship her? Are her crimes or her involvement with criminals excusable, or is she to be held accountable for the violence waged on her behalf?

3. What do you make of the police force’s cooperation with organized crime in hunting down the Wing and putting an end to their armed robberies? Is justice still served when mixed with the vengeance of villains?

4. Rene Shade and Shuggie Zeck were once extremely close friends as teenagers and got into more than their fair share of trouble in
their younger years. How would you characterize the relationship between Rene and Shuggie when the novel opens? In the moments before its conclusion?

5. Woodrell writes that Wanda Bouvier knows her body to be “a taunt that [sends] would-be Romeos off on quests for Love Oil and ceiling mirrors and nerve.” Considering what happens to and around Wanda in
Muscle for the Wing,
would you say Wanda’s sexuality generally places her at the mercy of male aggression, or is her body principally a weapon used to gain leverage over the men who desire her?

6. What would you say causes the Wing’s undoing? Shuggie’s death? Wanda and Rene Shade’s survival?

The Ones You Do

1. John X. Shade, father of Rene, Tip, and Francois, is no longer the man he used to be—by his sons’ observations as well as his own. In what way does Woodrell characterize the effects of aging on the kind of masculinity John X. represents? Has age softened the edges of John X. or just made him sloppier?

2. The first part of
The Ones You Do
is titled “Criminentlies,” a colloquial exclamation that stems from “criminy,” which in turn is a stand-in for “Christ.” Do you think the root meaning of this word, much used throughout
The Ones You Do,
has significance for the events portrayed? What, in your estimation, does the term signify to those who use it?

3. In the most general sense,
The Ones You Do
is the story of a return home—a narrative trope that extends all the way back to the Greek classics. What does it mean to return home in general, psychological terms? And for John X. in particular? Does John X. return in defeat? In triumph? In search of reckoning?

4.
Relationships between lovers play a primary role in the last novel of Woodrell’s Bayou Trilogy: the wayward John X. and his runaway wife, Randi Tripp; Rene Shade and his longtime lover, Nicole; Tip and the pregnant Gretel. In the cases of Rene and Trip, what draws each brother to these vastly different women, and vice versa? What does the promise of a union represent to each brother? To the women they would have?

5. In chapter 11, Gretel reflects on “normal” domestic life from her perspective as the child of highly alternative parents. Does her characterization of the average American household ring true to you? Is her free-form existence preferable to “normal” domesticity in any way, or simply tragic? To what extent has Gretel rejected the nature of her upbringing, and to what extent has she embraced her parents’ ideals?

6.
The Ones You Do
introduces the youngest member of the Shade clan, Etta, and features many scenes of the young girl interacting with her elderly father. How does Woodrell characterize their relationship? Would you say John X. is a mostly good or poor father? Does his parenting seem much changed from the role you envision him having played in raising Tip, Rene, and Francois?

The Bayou Trilogy

1. What changes, if any, do you see in Rene Shade over the course of the trilogy?

2. Has the Shade family changed for better or worse as a result of the events depicted in these three novels?

3. In the end, is St. Bruno on the path to betterment, or has the character of the city only continued to degrade?

Also by Daniel Woodrell

W
INTER’S
B
ONE

“A stunner. A bleak, beautifully told story about the inescapable bonds of land and blood…. Contemporary fiction at its finest.”

—Kathleen Johnson,
Philadelphia Inquirer

“Profound and haunting…. The lineage from Faulkner to Woodrell runs as deep and true as an Ozark stream.”

—Denise Hamilton,
Los Angeles Times Book Review

“As serious as a snakebite…. In
Winter’s Bone
Daniel Woodrell has hit upon the character of a lifetime…. His Old Testament prose and blunt vision have a chilly timelessness that suggests this novel will speak to readers as long as there are readers.”

—David Bowman,
New York Times Book Review

“Woodrell is a stunningly original writer…. Ree Dolly is one of the most memorable female heroes in modern American fiction.”

—Associated Press

“Sometimes brutal, sometimes mordantly funny, sometimes surprisingly sweet…. I just didn’t want
Winter’s Bone
to end.”

—Harper Barnes,
St. Louis Post-Dispatch