America, the land of opportunity.
There's
reason aplenty to be optimistic if you set out on a professional career
with a good education or have connections where you can land yourself
a decent job or can cash in on a unique talent or most especially... if
you come from money.
But what if you lack education,
connections, a special talent and don't have the dough to buy a decent
suit? Welcome to the world of A Hell of a Woman, Jim Thompson's 1954 hardboiled crime novel chock full of enough psychic mud to smear over each of its 196 pages.
The
tale's protagonist and narrator, Frank "Dolly" Dillon, a
thirty-year-old door-to-door salesman for Pay-E-Zee Stores, epitomizes
the working stiff who never caught a break in his miserable life. Abused
as a kid, kicked out of school, forced to peddle crap merchandise
door-to-door so he doesn't starve to death, Dolly is one beaten down
chump.
Regarding home life, hell, if you can call it that, by
Dolly's account he's had to put up with a sorry string of dirty,
good-for-nothing, lazy tramps. After taking the usual needling and
pounding from Staples, his soft-spoken, oily voice, son of a bitch
manager, Dolly drags himself back to his four-room dump and Joyce (wife
number three or four, Dolly's lost count) each evening, where he
relates:
"The kitchen sink was filled with dirty dishes: there
were soiled sticky pans all over the stove. She'd just got through
eating, it looked like, and of course she'd left the butter and
everything else sitting out. So now the roaches were having themselves a
meal. Those roaches really had a happy home with us. They got a hell of a
lot more to eat than I did."
So it goes, day after lousy day,
but then it happens on a rainy Thursday, his final call in the
door-to-door routine after he persuades an old bag to let him inside -
Dolly Dillon meets Mona. Ah, Mona, "a baby girl and sweet child and I
wouldn't hurt her for the world." After a few tender exchanges, Dolly
can see this swell blonde honey is just the type of dame he could
really, truly love.
A Hell of a Woman is a thriller.
Exactly what you don't need, dear reader, is a reviewer spoiling the
hell out of your reading pleasure by giving away too much. Thus, I'll
take a shuffle to overriding themes:
MUCKRAKING JIM
The publisher blurb states, "In A Hell of a Woman,
Jim Thompson offers another arresting portrait of a deviant
personality." However, if we scratch slightly deeper we'll detect Jim
Thompson provides a scathing depiction of the underside of American
capitalism, the ways in which the entire system is rigged in favor of
owners and companies and against people starting out with nothing,
rigged so much it twists and deforms human nature.
Deviant
personality, you say? Jim Thompson would have you consider if the entire
system can be judged deviant, spawning the type of men and women
spilling across the pages of this novel.
Jim Thompson's first
two published books were non-crime, literary novels focusing on
oppressive capitalism and its destructive effects on families and the
environment. If those early novels proved commercially successful, we
might wonder if Jim would continue as a 1950s-style muckraker in the
tradition of Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens from the Progressive
Era instead of switching to hardboiled crime fiction as a way to pay the
bills.
RELIABLE NARRATOR?
How much of what Frank Dillon
tells us is true, how much is exaggeration or complete horsecrap? I
think we can trust the general outline of events but when Frank
repeatedly throws in such phrases as "I'd swear to it on a stack of
Bibles," and "I kid you not, dear reader," and unswervingly
characterizes himself as the good, decent guy deserving all he takes,
even when he takes by violence, we can be fairly certain we're dealing
with...hum, Frank, really...a narrator that's less than reliable.
CHANGE OF RHYTHM
One curious insertion into A Hell of a Woman:
such chapter titles as: THROUGH THICK AND THIN: THE TRUE STORY OF A
MAN'S FIGHT AGAINST HIGH ODDS AND LOW WOMAN (author's caps)...by Knarf
Nollid.
It's as if Frank "Dolly" Dillon uses Horatio Alger rags
to riches storytelling as a way of recasting his life and shielding
himself from the truth of his own ongoing failures.
SILENCE
This
is 1950s America, not only the land of opportunity but the land of
logorrhea where everybody is a know-it-all and blabs nonstop. And this
sewer of chatter is fueled by continual consumption of tobacco and liquor.
Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. The dreaded enemy: silence. Frank Dillon falls
under the social spell, thinking the more he talks, both to others and
to himself, the more he'll figure out the needed solutions to all his
problems.
MONEY
The ultimate means and the ultimate end of
life in 1950s USA - in a word: money. "If only I had stacks and stacks
of greenbacks," so the thinking goes, then my life would be an unending
paradise. And what if individuals can smell all that dough but lack
legitimate means to make it their own? Are we to be shocked when so, so
many men and women turn to shady deals, robbery, murder, manipulation,
exploitation and the like as a way to realizing their dreams of living
in luxury on easy street?
REALITY LURKING BEHIND APPEARANCES
Frank
Dillon thinks he's so smart. But like so many others before him in
American society, he find out the hard way that people and things are
frequently not what they seem to be. As Jim Thompson knew from his own
life, capitalism sound good in theory but it has a tendency to pit
husband against wife, associate against associate, industry against
community, all in an ongoing battle to rake in as much of the big bucks
as possible.
MADNESS
A Hell of a Woman is a hell of a
novel. As events propel themselves forward, where will it all end?
Escape, happiness, madness, suicide? Oh, Dolly, you really did it this
time!
American crime novelist Jim Thompson, 1906-1977
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