0 The Nothing Man (1954)

Jim Thompson's The Nothing Man features an angry, sarcastic, drunken newspaperman named Brownie, who was castrated in the war, hence "the nothing." His boss at the newspaper was also his commanding officer in the war and Brownie is constantly mocking, needling, and trying to provoke him. As usual, something well to the side of the main events brings the most energy, in this case Brownie's constant caustic spew. Brownie dishes it out constantly, another one of Thompson's hellishly observed cases of foul disposition. The boss takes it from him because he feels sorry for him. At which point, some structural POV problems crop up, which Thompson attempts to deal with using alcoholic blackouts. Well, Thompson's plots tend to be purely incidental anyway, a loose skeleton onto which to drape things. What matters more is how well he manages to burrow into the psychotic mind, or some semblance of it peculiar to him and few others. On that score, The Nothing Man is not among his best. With Thompson, the hope always is for those chilling, clarifying breaks with reality, which connect in significant ways I think with writers like Poe, O'Connor, and Faulkner. In many ways all Thompson springs from the third section of The Sound and the Fury: tethers cut loose, raging with great abandon and almost no reason, and so desperate and vivid it is like staring through the pages. "Writing ecstatically," as Updike said of Nabokov. Well, there's less of that in The Nothing Man—it's good enough but second-tier. The whole impotence thing bores me now, after Faulkner's Sanctuary. With Thompson, I can let that go, along with the disappointing and mechanically happy ending. He's earned the right to fail now and then, even spectacularly, and The Nothing Man is not a failure, it's only entertaining.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: The Nothing Man (1954)

0 A Hell of a Woman (1954)

I tried to write about this one before, but it was awhile ago so here's another go. If not Jim Thompson's best, A Hell of a Woman is at least on the short list of his best. By nicknaming his main character here "Dolly"—otherwise a bill collector named Frank Dillon—I think Thompson makes clear that no one, least of all himself, is immune to the impulses of perversion, at the right time and place. Our hero Dolly breathes and swims in an effluvia of rot and corruption that is distinctly American—money and sex are what you get by swindling and manipulating, and a good day's work by a smart operator should net plenty of both. The reward, at the long day's end of work, is drinking and oblivion. Dolly doesn't want to be here anyway, he's just too cowardly to kill himself. The last chapter is his way of saying goodbye. The "self-destructive tendency" finally brings Dolly to its inevitable deserts. Along the way he thinks he has found the ideal woman—a hell of a woman, deeply victimized and passive. A case study in learned helplessness. But decidedly innocent, and even pure, if defiled. But of course Dolly can't even hang on to that—among other reasons, for his own stupidity, and the sin of vanity, believing himself to be the smartest person in town and on the planet too. As his dreams slip away and his doom is realized he cracks apart into strands of narrative resolution and implodes in front of our eyes. It's crudely Joycean at that point but works. Even more so as a dime novel paperback original. What in the world did people think? Printer error, I suspect. A couple of chapters are framed up as chapters from a memoir ... or something ... but it is otherwise straightforward lurid steamy pulp. A bill collector is cheating everybody in sight and getting away with nothing. A mysterious girl and her elderly aunt are conducting a prostitution operation out of their house. Couples bicker and fight and get drunk, and then the fights get worse. Why would anyone want to read such things in the first place? The horror of finding a calculating, intelligent mind and persuasive worldview behind it is almost impossible to overstate. A Hell of a Woman is one of the most chilling things I've ever encountered.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: A Hell of a Woman (1954)

0 A Swell-Looking Babe (1954)

I'm not sure what it says that one of the most typical and evocative titles concocted by Jim Thompson serves a story that reminds me more of minor keys in Theodore Dreiser and especially An American Tragedy. Oh yes, there's a glancing thread of incest, and sure, it's no doubt the ritzy hotel setting and the ambitious bellboy that puts me in mind of Dreiser. This is more of a caper story, which I find little more appealing here than I do when I find them in the movies. The swell-looking babe referenced in the title, and a good many other characters, harbor secrets. Our job is to read the novel until we find them out. The two places where Thompson seems most engaged are the details of the caper, with its complicated mess of betrayals, which is central to the story at hand, and the Freudian / Oedipal tensions between our hero the bellboy and his father, which is not. It's something like the stage act where multiple plates are set spinning atop of thin dowels. Busy busy. I kind of get the sense someone might have suggested Thompson try a proper beginning, middle, and end because so much attention is given to the plot. He really seems to have something he wants to say about the love between a mother and son but it's beside the caper point. The result feels muddled and belabored and often not that interesting. But it's still capable of the classic Thompson style—brusque, crazy, headlong. The image of the swell-looking babe is powerful and strange, even if her role is ultimately mundane and she's wasted. As for Dusty Rhodes, the bellboy, he's fine, another standard-issue Thompson figure—wise, underemployed, and desperate. The story is told third-person but it is so far inside Rhodes's head I kept being surprised it wasn't first-person. So, overall, a lesser Jim Thompson, a little mechanical and unsatisfying. But good enough, and interesting enough in the way it opened the door into the next one, as he evidently decided to start putting the monster female figures that haunt and devil his work right into the titles of the novels.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: A Swell-Looking Babe (1954)

0 Half Magic (1954)

In my mind I have a slight confusion between Edward Eager, the author of this and several other children's books about magic, and Edward Everett Horton, a character actor of the '30s who went on to narrate the Fractured Fairy Tales series in Jay Ward's Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. "Edward," I suppose, and all those Es. But there's also something in both of the kindly twinkly-eyed older man somehow privy to or at least aware of children's fantasy lives, and never disapproving. I know I am surely dating myself with reference to all these objects of affection from mid-20th century, but there you go. I won't say Edward Eager was the J.K. Rowling of approximately my generation—he never approached her ability to produce great slabs of tome, my single favorite aspect of the Harry Potter franchise—but he was dealing with kids and with magic all the same. Half Magic, the first of his so-called Magic series (I don't remember it having a name back in the day, but maybe that's me) is not surprisingly tentative, the product I understand of Eager's own frustration that there were no children's books he wanted to read to his his son Fritz, besides those of E. Nesbit. (As an aside, books by Nesbit were not available in the children's libraries where I obtained the Eager books, and thus I assumed they were just further fabrication.) With Half Magic, Eager started to write them himself. The basic premise here is simple and ingenious—a  mysterious found coin grants our heroes, a group of children who also appear in Eager's next book, Magic by the Lake, exactly one-half of each wish, though they can't predict how it will be divided in half, let alone which half they will get. But they try anyway to outthink it by doubling their wishes, with the kinds of results you can (or cannot) imagine. Eager was a native of Ohio born in 1911, a Harvard graduate, and a playwright and lyricist of some distinction as well the author of children's books. Not surprisingly the language in Half Magic is a perfect pleasure to read, simple and straightforward, out of the pellucid school of mid-century New Yorker. And everybody likes these books—certainly I do, still, very much—though I worry they may also seem antiquated. This would be the point where I heave a big self-satisfied sigh. "Oh, for the good old days again. Kids, get off my lawn with your fool smartphones," etc. But that doesn't mean it's not a good book.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Half Magic (1954)