Book Review & Analysis: Car by Harry Crews

Car

by Harry Crews

      What would you be willing to do for fame? What if you want to be famous but have no talent? If popular culture in America has proven anything, it is that some people will do anything, no matter how degrading or humiliating, just as long as they have a camera pointed in their direction. In the 1970s, there was The Gong Show. It was a talent show for people who had no talent. They would get on stage and make fools of themselves and if the celebrity panel hated them enough they would bang a gong and whoever was on stage lost. There were rarely ever any winners. I do have to say, however, that the recurrent guest Gene Gene the Dancing Machine was an all around cool contestant. I’d share a six pack with him any day of the week.

Fascination for this kind of junk entertainment isn’t limited to America or any one time and place. Previous times gave us carny freak shows and circus side shows with geeks who bit the heads off live chickens. There might be an artistic side to boxing, but in the end all the audience wants to see is somebody being beaten to a bloody pulp. Entertainment in the Roman Empire made a spectacle out of gladiators fighting to the death. Medieval times made bear baiting a sport. Even Shakespeare satirized a talentless theater troupe in the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In more recent times we’ve had TV shows like Fear Factor and The Jerry Springer Show. Jackass was all about people who intentionally hurt themselves for the sake of comedy. In the 1980s, a man from India made it into The Guiness Book of World Records for growing the longest fingernails; he said he did that simply because his life’s goal was to be famous. The contemporary porn industry is partially about people voluntarily subjecting themselves to sexual degradation and humiliation in exchange for large sums of money. In the middle of all this, we’ve got the short novel Car by the master of grit lit himself, Harry Crews.

The lead character of the book is Herman. He grew up in the presence of wrecked cars. His father came up with the idea of making an auto graveyard in Jacksonville, Florida. Open to the public, people can spend a few quiet moments with a car they had crashed or one in which a loved one has died. His sister Junell’s job is to collect the wrecks in her tow truck and stack them up in the yard. His twin brother, strangely named Mister, puts the cars through compactors so they can be sold as scrap metal. The auto graveyard didn’t turn out to be lucrative enough so the family had to start selling the junked vehicles to make money. Herman grew up in this atmosphere, surrounded by auto wrecks at a business that didn’t live up to the vision his father had conceived. The theme of deferred dreams runs throughout the novel and sets us up for what comes later. Speaking of conception, Herman also wonders how many babies are conceived in the back seats of cars. In American culture, the automobile is all pervasive. It is alpha and omega and everything in between. Automobiles are fetishized for sexuality and status, and in Herman’s case, automobiles are food.

Herman is a dreamer. His dream is to become famous. How does a man whose talents extend no further than running a junkyard become famous? He captures the attention of the world by announcing that he will eat a car in public, piece by piece, over the course of several years. The news spreads all over America and even gets as far as Japan. When the time comes, he appears on stage in a hotel ballroom in front of a packed audience twice a day. For the morning show, he eats little pieces of the car and for the late show, he poops the pieces out after passing through his digestive system. The pieces are then sold for outrageous amounts of money and some are made into model replicas of the car he is eating. This is broadcast live on television and Herman’s fame keeps growing.

Herman is narratively paired up with a prostitute named Margo. She works at the hotel where Herman’s car consumption takes place. As the two bond with each other, she offers to have sex with him for free. She has a bit of a car fetish and sleeping with him will be the closest she ever comes to having sex with a car. As the saying goes, you are what you eat. The two becomes friends rather than lovers since they connect at a human level. Both of them attempt to consume something that can’t be entirely consumed. Herman wants to consume a car and Margo wants to consume sexuality itself by sleeping with as many men as possibly. Both of them attempt to fill a void resulting from past experience. Herman is haunted by a childhood trauma that happened in the auto graveyard and Margo was disappointed with her first sexual experience in the back of a sports car with a complete stranger. These are their interpersonal connections. The wider social circumstances link them together too because both are victims of financial exploitation.

Mr. Edge is a businessman who owns the hotel where Herman is eating the car. He is the promoter of the show and also the one who hired Margo to sell her body there to draw customers. Crews uses Mr. Edge to attack the dehumanizing institution of show business. His sole motivation is money and making it through the exploitation of Herman and Margo is his means. He cares nothing about their physical or psychological safety just as long as the money keeps rolling in. In the tradition of P.T. Barnum, he gets rich by making a spectacle out of degradation. If Herman and Margo are paired as objects of exploitation for profit, albeit willing ones, Mr. Edge is equally paired with Herman’s twin brother Mister in the way they both capitalize off Herman’s stunt. Mister sees the potential for getting rich off Herman, elects himself to be his business manager, and bullies Mr. Edge into signing a contract giving him a large percentage of the earnings drawn from the performances. But poetic justice is served when Herman is in too much pain to continue eating the car. Mister, being his identical twin, is forced by Mr. Edge to take Herman’s place on stage without the audience knowing the difference. The results are not pleasant for Mister and you can’t feel sympathy for him because he places money making before family. His wealth derives from using his brother for entertainment, not caring how that might be effecting Herman.

As for the audience, the only reason this kind of entertainment is possible is because millions of people eagerly pay money to watch it. There is something in humanity that is amused by watching people make fools of themselves. It allows us to point our fingers at them and say,”I may not be anything special but at least I’m not the one doing that.” It appeals to our sense of superiority. And as a reading audience we are just as guilty of this as the ones in the ballroom watching Herman eat the car and shit out the pieces. After all, the reason you read this is because you want to watch a guy eat a car. This book confronts you with your own morbid sense of curiosity.

Harry Crews successfully critiques the sleaziness and dehumanization of the entertainment industry. He also critiques the way that cars have become an all consuming fetish in American culture in the way that people celebrate the beauty of the automobiles’ appearance and use, the sentimental attachments people form with their cars, and the fascination with destruction in the form of car crashes and junkyards. But Harry Crews is a humanist and underneath the steely surface of this novel, he finds humanity in the forsaken dreams and past traumas of some of the characters. The world in this book is a rotten world and people like Margo, Herman, and his father are caught up in it. They may have made bad choices, but that is what happens to most people at some time so you can’t fault them for that.

There are two parts of the story that don’t quite work. One is the reason Herman gives for wanting to eat the car. I don’t mean the desire to be famous; I do mean the connection between his childhood trauma and his strange fascination with wanting to devour a motor vehicle. The trauma did involve cars, but I can’t see why he would think that his publicity stunt would compensate for that. The other part is Margo’s self-disclosures. Her explanation of her trade is hard to buy as most prostitutes don’t enter their profession because they love promiscuity. It’s also hard to swallow her explanation for why some prostitutes don’t have gag reflexes (pun intended). It looks like Crews felt he needed to have Margo explain herself, but didn’t have a solid idea of what he wants her to say.

Still, Car is a great book to read. The writing is rough around the edges, but Harry Crews does here what he does best. He lures you in by tempting you with something so sick and absurd that you don’t want to turn away. In the process, he confronts you with observations about human nature you might not have considered otherwise. This novel might comfort you or it might disturb you. It depends on who you are. But never will it bore you. Otherwise, it’s a whole new way of looking at consumer culture.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Scar Lover by Harry Crews

Scar Lover

by Harry Crews

      It’s better to burn out than to fade away. Or so sang Neil Young in his classic song “My My Hey Hey”, a tribute to Sid Vicious even though the name is changed to Johnny Rotten to fit the rhyme scheme of the lyrics. So when reading the earlier works of Harry Crews, you might be forgiven for thinking the Southern Gothic master of grit lit would be more likely to burn out. He came from a rough town and lived a rough life on a steady diet of whiskey and cocaine. But when reading Scar Lover, one of his last novels, you find that he faded away instead.

This novel is full of scars in a similar way to how his earlier novel A Feast of Snakes use ubiquitous snakes as a literary device. The main character, Pete Butcher, doesn’t have any visible scars. Instead he has a self-inflicted mental scar due to an accident when he hit his younger brother Jon in the forehead with a hammer, leaving a scar there and causing permanent brain damage to the poor kid, kind of like an unintentional lobotomy. Jon got put away in an institution and their parents died in a fire while trying to sell a pig to raise enough money to support Jon. So Pete blames himself for the demise of the family. He becomes sullen and withdrawn, indulging in self-hatred, pushing away anyone who tries to get close to him. An elderly man named Mr. Winekoff who is kindly and friendly, but also nosy and a bit daft tries to bring Pete out of himself and Pete doesn’t react with kindness. But Mr. Winekoff (Is that meant to sound like “wank off”?) serves as a bridge between Pete and the family next door where an attractive young woman learns about Pete from Winekoff’s gossip. Her name is Sarah and she introduces herself to Pete. Later they fall in love and he moves in with her and her parents, a hard working and honest man named Henry Leemer who makes a living by chopping wood and her mother Gertrude Leemer who returns from the hospital after having her breasts amputated because of cancer.

When Henry Leemer dies, Sarah and her mother are faced with the dilemma of what to do with his body and how to use their inheritance money. This is when George and Linga become important to the story. George is Pete’s friend and collegue; together they share a miserable job unloading freight cars. George is Jamaican and has horseshoe scars branded across his back which he believes give him magical powers. His wife Linga is an obeah woman and cult leader with colorful, decorative scars all over her face. I can’t tell if they are actually tattoos or not as Harry Crews doesn’t explain it in much detail. Anyhow, Gertrude Leemer decides to put Linga in charge of the funeral ceremony and the disposal of Harry Leemer’s body. Unfortunately, Linga is a grifter and Gertrude Leemer has also put her in charge of managing the inheritance money. On the good side though, Linga has also agreed to help reunite Pete with his lost brother Jon.

So far so good. The character development is strong. It deals with flawed but realistic people who have realistic dilemmas. Pete is a broken man but he isn’t beyond repair and Sarah has the strength of character to help him with what he needs. Henry and Gertrude are unique and strong in their own ways as are George and Linga.

But the narrative kind of fizzles out when Linga enters the story. Initially Harry’s corpse had been taken to the morgue, but Gertrude decides she wants to cremate him herself. So Linga and her husband George take Pete to the funeral parlor to retrieve Mr. Leemer’s dead body. For some reason I can’t comprehend, Crews stretches this segment out to an unnecessary length. They go on a long car ride to the funeral home, take lots of breaks to smoke weed, and carry the body out to the car. In fact, the narrative stops for their pot smoking breaks so many times it becomes redundant without serving any useful purpose in the story. For all its detail and page count, this stretch of prose doesn’t enhance either the character development or the plot in any way that is necessary. We do learn how domineering Linga can be and how she uses threats and intimidation to get her way, but this could have been said more effectively with less wordage. The same can be said for the funeral ceremony they hold in the swamp. It’s all a bit morbid and macabre, but Crews doesn’t overdo those elements in order to keep the characters’ humanity in the forefront. But again, this passage is extended unnecessarily so much so that it would have had a more powerful impact if it had been shorter.

In the end, all conflicts get confronted and Harry Crews demonstrates how a woman who is ordinary but strong and sincere can work the magic that is needed to bring out the best in a man, namely her future husband Pete Butcher. In contrast, Linga, the exotic obeah woman who practices magic, is nothing but a money grubbing leech and her magic is nothing but a smokescreen to hide her true nature. Crews shows us how the real power of a woman is in the everyday world right in front of our eyes. It doesn’t dazzle the senses, but it is potent and it is there if we look for it. The biggest problem I had with all this was that the story has no real confrontational climax at the end. As the story goes on, it is clear that Pete doesn’t believe in Linga’s magic and sees her for the con artist she is, but he never actually gets into a fight with her over it and the end of the story is weak as a result.

Scar Lover is obviously the work of an aging author. It doesn’t have the manic energy or the shock value of Harry Crews’ earlier novels. But you can tell he has grown as a person by the time he wrote it. While the themes and content are more mature, the actual prose suffers from a lack of energy. It’s still Harry Crews and his fans will probably find something to like here, but it doesn’t live up to his earlier works. It’s best if you read some of those before picking this one up.

 

Book Review & Analysis: All We Need of Hell by Harry Crews

All We Need of Hell

by Harry Crews

     If you’ve read Harry Crews’ novel A Feast of Snakes you will be familiar with Duffy Deeter. In that story, he befriends Joe Lon and Willard as they walk around the campground where Deeter’s winnebago is parked. They spot him as he sets up a bench and begins lifting weights. They ask if they can join in and they take turns chugging liters of whiskey between bench presses before embarking on a series of misadventures. Duffy Deeter is there to attend the annual rattlesnake hunt. He leaves his wife behind in Florida and brings a female cocaine sniffing graduate student along for sexual entertainment. That same Duffy Deeter is brought back in All We Need of Hell as the protagonist of the story rather than a supporting character.

In fact, the opening paragraphs in All We Need of Hell are lifted directly, almost word for word, from A Feast of Snakes, the big difference being that the name of the cocaine sniffing coed nymphette has been changed to Marvella. We are immediately transported inside Duffy’s mind as he fantasizes about violence from World War II while having sex with her in his mobile home. This time he isn’t in rural Georgia though, he is right near home in Gainesville, Florida where he works as a lawyer and lives with his wife Tish and their son Felix. Duffy is athletic and obsessed with physical fitness while his son prefers to eat junk food and watch TV. Tish is a woman he just can’t relate to. She can’t relate to him either. He tries to teach them about Zen Buddhism and Taosim by holding meditation sessions in their backyward and then making Felix work out in his private gym. None of this is going well for any of them. Tish is also having an affair with Duffy’s law partner, the chronically irritating Jert McPhester. How could you possibly respect a man with a name like that?

Duffy Deeter knows his life is on the wrong track, but he has no idea how to set things to right. He has a hilarious confrontation with Jert which I won’t describe here. I’ll just ruin it for you if I do, but I will say it involves Duffy crushing Jert’s testicles. Later, in another hilarious scene, Duffy breaks into his own house while Tish and Jert are having sex in his bed. I won’t spoil this one either, but it does involve a paddle and Jert’s ass. An especially clever passage happens afterwards when Tish calls Duffy and begs him to come home because she thinks a burglar had broken into their house. When Duffy arrives, the police are there and Duffy gloats because he knows what really happened and he watches as Tish and Jert, who don’t know the truth, lie to the police. It is one of those times when only the protagonist and the reader know the truth while the others in the room don’t. Harry Crews pulls this literary trick off perfectly; by making the truth a secret that is shared between Duffy and yourself, you get drawn closer to him as a character.

After hitting rock bottom, a new friend appears in Duffy’s life, an African American professional football player named Tump. That name must mean something special to Crews because he also uses it as the name of the football coach in A Feast of Snakes. This is a man who understands how low and confused Duffy is and he goes about helping him solve his problems. Tump’s first approach is to make friends with Duffy’s son Felix. The two of them get along perfectly so Duffy drives them off in his winnebago, they go pick up Marvella, and the four of them go to a football field to run around in the moonlight all night. Tump brings Felix out of his shell and Duffy realizes he doesn’t know how to relate to his son.

There is another clever twist here because Tump embodies what Duffy thinks he believes. Duffy is deeply into Eastern mysticism and spends time meditating and reciting mantras, but he doesn’t understand what any of it means. He uses it to build an armor around himself and he also uses it as a means of controlling his wife and son by trying to teach the philosophy to them. In his mind, he is trying to connect with them, but it all fails. What Duffy fails to understand is that Zen and Taosim are all about letting life happen and not being in control. This is what Tump embodies; he gets through to Felix because he lets their friendship happen rather than forcing it. Tump is so successful at life because he always goes with the flow. As Duffy watches them tossing the football around, he realizes how proud he is of Felix and also sees what he has been doing wrong. There is another poignant moment in this passage when Tump tells Duffy how important mothers are. You can literally see Duffy shrink even though Crews doesn’t specifically write that. Duffy wants to be the head and the leader of his family, but this desire is so overblown that he fails to see the value in his own wife. He shrivels because he knows Tump is right. This humanizes him because he realizes his own weakness and his own mistake at this point. Rather than reacting with the expected bluster, he instead admits to himself that it is time to change.

Since Duffy is having an existential crisis, he begins to look back over his life and think about his relationship with his parents. He visits his widowed, agoraphobic mother who lives in a dark apartment with the curtains permanently draw and fishbowls on the shelves with about half of them being home to dead goldfish floating on the surfaces. She insists on feeding all of them so he wonders about her sanity. More importantly, he revives memories of his father, an air force pilot who lost his sanity after fighting Nazis in World War II. Although his father was loving and quite a lot of fun, Duffy locates the source of all his problems in their relationship.

By the end of the book, Tump has helped Duffy repair his relationships with everybody in his family including Tish. Duffy comes to the realization that he feels a need to be in control because he fears vulnerability. This is rooted in his desire to avoid going insane like his fathe. Both Duffy and Tish admit that they don’t know each other and agree to begin again. They also agree that neither of them are to blame for their failing marriage. Sometimes things don’t work out because that is part of being human. And you know what happens next. You should know from experience that the making out after making up is the sweetest, most delicious love making you can make.

Aside from all the amazing plot twists, narrative tension, and dark humor, this novel succeeds because it does such a great job with character studies. From the start, we are immediately plunged into the strange and terrible mind of Duffy who instantly becomes an unforgettable character. Despite being the kind of person I wouldn’t want to know, he turns out to be admirable for his determination, his passion, and the deviously twisted logic of his complex mind. A writer is great when they can make you see the world from the point of view of someone you wouldn’t ordinarily understand and Harry Crews succeeds brilliantly in this. He is also a great character because he subverts our expectations. Since he is such an alpha male type of guy to the hilt, you would expect him to react to his situation in a less sympathetic way. But instead he is man enough to admit his faults, confront his weaknesses, and attempt to make amends for what he has done wrong. In Duffy Deeter, and in Tump too, Harry Crews has tapped into what it means to be a real man. A large part of that means being responsible as well as tough. There has never been a literary character as unique as Duffy Deeter and there never will be again.

And something has to be said about Tump since he is such a central figure in the plot. He is the deus ex machina that arranges for everything to work out right in the end. Being fun, insightful, big hearted, charismatic, and honest, he is nothing but lovable and in many ways he really steals the show. You feel like you get to know him on an intimate level. He is eternally optimistic, but he isn’t looking at the world through rose colored glasses since all the good he sees in other people is really there. Everybody, that is, except for Jert McPhester. You just can’t admire a guy whose name is Jert McPhester. But I fear that describing Tump in too much detail here would be an injustice. You have to read the book to experience him for yourself.

All We Need Of Hell isn’t as grotesque as Harry Crews’ earlier novels, but it does have its moments where it feels like someone is hammering a nail into your funny bone. It is also the work of a more mature Harry Crews with less shock value and transgression and a lot more humanity. I haven’t read all of his novels, but for now I might gamble and say that this could be his most polished work with all the right elements of character development, plot progression, and its mixture of complexity and accessibility. It is entertaining, but also deep and dark enough to be cathartic. Any writer who can pull off such an optimistic ending that is also believable has a lot going for them. It’s an underrated novel by an underrated writer and I’m surprized it hasn’t been made into a movie. It would be good as the kind of indy, art house American family comedy-dramas that Alexander Payne is known for.

 

Book Review & Analysis: A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

A Feast of Snakes

by Harry Crews

      Ophiophobic readers beware. Harry Crews’ A Feast of Snakes is not for you, or at least not if you plan on sleeping anytime soon. Herpetologists probably won’t get much out of this either because there is nothing scientific going on in this novel. If you love snakes, this one probably isn’t for you either since most snakes in the book come to a bitter end. But if you’re into grit lit, transgressive fiction, or Southern Gothic, this short and dark novel might have something going for it. This book is permeated with rattlesnakes who slide into every plot line, every characters, and even into people’s stomachs in a scene where the slithery critters get deep fried and eaten for dinner.

As the novel begins, the remote town of Mystic, Georgia is gearing up for their annual rattlesnake hunt, a night of festivities at the high school followed by a day when the snakes are forced out of their underground hiding places and captured. It is an event that draws people from all over the region.

Joe Lon is the central character. He once was the star of the high school football team, but his life went nowhere after that. His girlfriend Berenice goes off to college while Joe Lon stays behind with a wife and two kids he doesn’t want. He beats her and verbally abuses her, leaving her with the kids while he runs around with his best friend, the thoroughly unlikable Willard who has replaced him as the star of the football team. The two of them drink gallons of whiskey and have a series of misadventures that later include Deeter Duffy, a lawyer from Florida who has nothing but bad intentions. Joe Lon also works in a shack that sells liquor. The night before the festival, Joe Lon visits his father who is training a pit bull for a dog fight on the eve of the rattlesnake hunt. Joe Lon’s sister lives with the father, but she is insane, refusing to leave her room and does nothing but stay in bed watching TV with the volume turned up to maximum. It is a bleak and unhappy life.

Joe Lon’s living situation is so similar to that of Harry Angstrom’s in Rabbit Run by John Updike that it is hard to imagine that Joe Lon isn’t based on Updike’s most famous character. Both were star athletes in high school who ended up in miserable jobs and living in an unhappy marriage with the unwanted responsibility of raising children. Both are looking for a means of escape and make all the wrong choices up until the end.

A major turning point comes when Berenice returns to Mystic to introduce Joe Lon to her fiance. Joe Lon’s friends agree to get his wife out of their home so he can have a tryst with Berenice. But the seduction is less than romantic; in fact it is downright gross and degrading and from there, all the events of the novel continue on a downward trajectory, getting darker and more destructive as the pages go on until the big blowout during the rattlesnake hunt.

A subplot involving the town’s sheriff, Buddy Matlow, is possibly the most interesting part of the story. Buddy is a Vietnam vet with a wooden leg and a few screws loose in his head. He imprisons a young African American girl and gives her a choice between sleeping with him or being bit by a rattlesnake he keeps in a bucket near her cell. Out of fear, she gives in to him and then he releases her from jail. Even though Buddy is a rapist, he has some strange delusion that she loves him and they are in a relationship together. Later he picks her up in his car, takes her to a place in the woods and Lottie Mae gets her revenge by killing his snake with a razor blade. Go read the book to find our what I mean. What Buddy does with his snake afterwards is one of the most hilarious episodes of gallows humor I have read in a very long time.

Overall the presence of snakes in this narrative is unique and effectively done. The rattlesnake is the high school mascot. They are playthings for the backwoods hicks in Mystic. They show up in people’s dreams. They get eaten for dinner. They serves as artistic inspiration. The snakes figure literally as elements in the plot and metaphorically as symbols of anxiety, pride, masculinity, immorality, sleaziness, and evil. This is a novel packed with unique ideas and the presence of snakes is one that really ties everything together.

The least satisfying part of the novel is with the character of Joe Lon himself. He is a wounded and miserable young man with no direction in life and no idea what to do about it. He drinks liquor compulsively and does little more than cause trouble. He isn’t entirely unsympathetic though. We learn that his mother’s death is the source of his problems and, although he is a racist, he does stand up for the African American characters when no one else will. That much makes him a somewhat well-rounded character. Where he falls short in his development is that he is so unemotional. The narrative and his actions tell us that he is not happy, but he never expresses the kind of despair we are supposed to attach to him. If Crews had delved deeper into his inner emotional turmoil, he would have been stronger as an unsympathetic protagonist with some sympathetic character traits.

A Feast of Snakes is a mean and ugly book about mean and ugly people. This is disturbing literature on a number of levels. The characters are unforgettable and that may not necessarily be a good thing depending on your tolerance for the darker side of humanity. But their unforgettable nature is one of the greatest things about the writing of Harry Crews. They don’t just stick in your head because they are so terrible; they stay there because Harry Crews is such a talented writer. If this work of fiction doesn’t bother you enough, just remember that there are places off the beaten path in rural America that aren’t so different from what we have in this novel.