Author: allen0997
Muscle for the Wing ~ A Capsule Book Review
Muscle for the Wing ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp
We first met boxer-turned-policeman Rene Shade in Daniel Woodrell’s 1986 novel, Under the Bright Lights. He’s back two years later in Muscle for the Wing, another crime romp set in the fictional bayou city of St. Bruno. Muscle for the Wing is not as atmospheric as Under the Bright Lights, but there’s still plenty of murder, mayhem and people doing ugly things to each other.
Wanda Bone Bouvier is the redhaired femme fatale in Muscle for the Wing. (She inflames men’s passions, don’t you know.) She’s married to the much-older Ronnie Bouvier, who is behind bars. She claims to love Ronnie, but that does not keep her from being carnally unfaithful with tough-guy Emil Jadick. She’s going to get revenge on Emil for Ronnie’s sake (and at his direction from the state penitentiary), but she admits openly that she “digs” Emil’s muscular body. (She’s a good-time girl who will take her fun wherever she can get it.) Emil wants Wanda to be his number-one girl—and his alone—not knowing she will eventually hurt him in a big way. When she gets a job as a do-anything stripper in a naughty nightclub, it’s all part of Ronnie’s plan.
When young, off-duty police officer Gerry Bell is shot to death at a gentlemen’s poker game at the country club by intruders set on robbing the wealthy poker players, police officer Rene Shade is called in to figure out what happened. Evidence leads to Emil Jadick and his two dimwitted associates, all members of a white supremacist prison clique called “the Wing.”
World-weary, boxer-turned-policeman Rene Shade has lived in St. Bruno his whole life; he knows the city and he knows the people. In investigating the murder of Gerry Bell, he’s drawn into a morass of crime and corruption, involving some of his old friends and associates, including friend-since-childhood Shuggie Zeck, who beats his wife to a bloody pulp. In St. Bruno, everybody is tainted in some way. There’s no such thing as innocence. Everybody is guilty of something. You can’t even tell the good people from the bad ones.
Daniel Woodrell is one of the best current American writers. If you like redneck noir, nobody does it better. His books are a delight to read, even if you are on your second reading. I highly recommend The Death of Sweet Mister and Tomato Red.
Copyright © 2020 by Allen Kopp
The Nickel Boys ~ A Capsule Book Review
The Nickel Boys ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp
Colson Whitehead’s novel, The Nickel Boys, won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It’s a story about a fictional (but based in reality) boys’ reformatory in Florida, the Nickel Academy, in the early 1960s.
The principal character is a black teen named Elwood Curtis. Elwood lives with—and is raised by—his grandmother, Harriet, since his parents have run off and left him. Harriet works as a maid in a hotel.
Elwood is a “good” boy who doesn’t get into trouble the way some of his friends do. He works in a small store that sells newspapers, cigarettes, and candy and he understands the value of an education. When he is riding in a stolen car that he doesn’t even know is stolen, he is arrested and ends up being sentenced to the Nickel Academy.
Elwood is out of his depth at Nickel, meaning he doesn’t belong there. He meets all kinds of other boys, some of them friendly and others bullying and cruel. They all have one thing in common: they are all part of a cruel and unjust system that punishes young people, black and white, who haven’t yet reached adulthood. Boys are routinely mistreated (inadequate food), beaten, locked in solitary confinement or a “sweat box,” or sexually assaulted. Those who commit a serious enough transgression might be beaten and tortured to death and, after their bodies are furtively buried, reported to have “run off.”
When state inspectors come to Nickel for an inspection, management puts on a good show to demonstrate that they are taking good care of their charges, even to the point of serving good food with ice cream for dessert (on that day only). Elwood Curtis has a plan. He has been keeping a written record of what conditions are really like at Nickel and how people are really being treated. He hopes to slip the written record to one of the inspectors without any of the Nickel employees seeing. He’s taking a dangerous risk; if he gets caught, it could mean the end of him.
The Nickel Boys is a good book, but I think you will agree it’s not a great book. It’s the companion piece to a novel from three years ago called The Underground Railroad, which also won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. (Colson Whitehead is one of only four writers to win two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction in their careers; the others are Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and John Updike.) Both novels deal with black issues while embracing universal themes of belonging, oneness, isolation, and functioning in a world that is very often unjust to anybody of any skin color.
Copyright © 2020 by Allen Kopp
Literary Fictions 