Just Good Old Fashioned Story Telling

I've recently enjoyed several books that push the boundaries of what a novel can be... Demon Theory by Stephen Graham Jones is presented as a novelization of a horror film trilogy, Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl is presented in the form of a required reading list with pen and ink drawings, and of course, Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski which has to be seen to be believed.

All three of those books are ambitious, challenging, and go above and beyond just words on the page. And I'll talk more about them in the future.

But today, I'm left in amazement at how Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell is so incredibly basic and yet so beautiful. The plot of Winter's Bone centers around sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly, a girl in the Ozarks struggling to keep her family together. Her father has disappeared, which isn't unusual, but this time she learns that he put the family home up for his bail. If he doesn't appear at court, the government will seize the home, casting Ree, her two little brothers, and her disabled mother into the frigid winter. So Ree defiantly searches for her father, running afoul of mountain traditions and family hierarchy in the process.

The page-to-page activity is amazingly simple. Ree makes a meal for the kids, then she walks to some other holler to ask someone about her father, then she walks back, then she chops some wood, then she makes another meal, and so forth. In the second half of the novel, there are some real life and death conflicts, but in the first part, there's just a lot of walking.

And it's wonderful. Woodrell tells this fantastic story without using a lot of pyrotechnics. Just simple language, good old fashioned story telling, and a love of the landscape.

I started this entry by mentioning three books that break all kinds of boundaries and I'm not trying to compare Woodrell's work to them. Nor, am I expecting those books to compare with Woodrell's. They're different works of art entirely, with different agendas and goals, different strengths and weaknesses. It just puts Woodrell's achievement into perspective. He's able to tell the simplest of stories, in the simplest way, and make it gripping, riveting, and new.