“But where you-all come into this is, he put this house, here, and those timber acres up for his bond.”
“He what now?”
“Signed it all over. You didn’t know? Jessup signed over everything. If he don’t show for trial, see, the way the deal works is, you-all lose this place. It’ll get sold from under you. You’ll have to get out. Got somewhere to go?”
Ree nearly fell but would not let it happen in front of the law. She heard thunder clapping between her ears and Beelzebub scratchin’ a fiddle. The boys and her and Mom would be dogs in the fields without this house. They would be dogs in the fields with Beelzebub scratchin’ out tunes and the boys’d have a hard hard shove toward unrelenting meanness and the roasting shed and she’d be stuck along side them ‘til the steel doors clanged shut and the flames rose. . .
Ree stretched over the rail, pulled her hair aside and let the snow land on her neck. She closed her eyes, tried to call to mind the sounds of a far tranquil ocean, the lapping waves. She said, ”I’ll find him.”
“Girl, I been lookin’, and . . .
“I’ll find him.”—from Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell
Daniel Woodrell has been one of America’s finest crime novelists for more than a decade, though you couldn’t prove it by his book sales which have disappointed his publishers, his adoring critics and fans(myself included), and his writer’s ego. His novels deal with crime out in the sticks. His publicists tried to market them as “country noirs”, countertype to the more traditional “urban noirs”. American readers weren’t buying the notion, so that even though reviewers raved about Winter’s Bone, The Death of Sweet Mister, and Tomato Red (his last three books) the idea of the country noir was just not catching on. His New York Times book reviews compared him to Faulkner and Chandler, his earnest cult following shook its collective head.
By most standards he was a highly talented but unlucky novelist, who could not get his career going. Then he got lucky. An Indie film maker named Debra Granik read Winter’s Bone and immediately wanted to film it. Using dialogue right out of the book and following Woodrell’s plot quite closely, she managed to put together a very fine independent film, which won her two Sundance Awards, including Best Picture. Film reviewers, many of whom had read the book, were ecstatic, praising Woodrell as well as Granick for their contributions to the film. The film is now a hit. The publisher is so excited about the book they’ve put a tie-in style cover on it the like they do with Ian McEwen and Dennis Lehane.
Tomato Red and Death of Sweet Mister will also be rushed back into print this Fall and plans are being made to make all of his work available again. So we have a reversal of fortune for one of the literary world’s finest writers and one of its nicest guys.
Your first assignment is to read Winter’s Bone. The film may never reach Iowa City.
