The Death of Sweet Mister by Daniel Woodrell

Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone was about a dirt poor family set deep in the Ozarks. So is Sweet Mister. But don’t even think Woodrell is revisiting familiar ground. Same zip code maybe, but entirely different themes.

Red and Glenda Akins have one really screwed up marriage. Red is a twice-burned petty criminal with a chip on his shoulder. He and Glenda married way too young and Glenda was no where near ready to be a wife. She partied a bit and whether Red or just this guy was the father of her son is sort of obscure. The son, who goes by Shuggie, is a fat, 13 year old kid with a double chin (Glenda says it makes him look “prosperous.” Shug says, when you’re a teenager, you are just fat). Shug, Glenda’s Sweet Mister, is just beginning to notice girls, especially Glenda in the way she dresses “none too motherly,” carries herself, flirts with most any guy, drinks, smokes, and talks. Together, Glenda and Shug live in a broken down cabin doing caretaker work on the neighboring cemetery, doing their damn best to keep Red from blowing his stack and taking out his anger mostly on Glenda. Shug tries to protect her, but he doesn't quite seem to be cut from the same gene pool, physically or emotionally, as Red.

Basil is Red’s running bud and both are “a bubble off plumb.” They go for weeks at a time “scallybippin” anything they think has some value – cigarettes, clothes, TVs, toasters, you name it. They will also haul Shug along for “man stuff,” forcing Shug to break into homes of really sick folks who have been prescribed serious pain meds.

As dumb luck would have it, Glenda and Shug are out for a walk and meet up a guy dipping his feet in the creek next to where he parked his T-bird. Casual conversation. That’s all. But he sure seemed nice. A cook at a local eatery following the cook smoke wherever it took him.

Over and over, Red’s return is the prelude to a beating – on Glenda, Shug, or both. Shug tenderly nurses his mom’s wounds and they return to whatever normalcy follows. And the guy with the T-bird. That T-bird. A chat turns to a smoke and a drink to a dinner, to repeated visits to the cabin by the cemetery to far more. Of course, when Red finds out, he takes it all out on Glenda.

But this time, Glenda and her T-bird man fight back and Basil is forced to find out why Red has disappeared without him knowing anything. If Glenda and Shug stay, they will eventually face the wrath of Basil. The cook has a line on a job in New Orleans and wants Glenda and Shug to move there with him. Shug ain’t happy and shows proof to Basil of Red’s fate. The New Orleans job falls through, but a job on a Miami-based cruise ship pops up, so Glenda starts packing and makes arrangements for Shug to live with his grandmother.

But the cook never shows. Leaving Shug to comfort his mother’s loss in ways no boy should ever have to do.

Many thanks to MRB friend Charlie Stella for his original recommendation of Winter’s Bone (and if you haven’t seen the movie, you don’t know what you are missing. Watch the ‘Making of” segment for some really eye-opening casting). I went back to Woodrell for no particular reason and this was a good treatment for one still a bit burnt out by Tom Clancy’s latest monster. This little tale packs a ton of emotion into less than 200 pages of a 6x9 inch layout.

As Red’s anger with Glenda grows, I was expecting Shug to pay the ultimate price, but in the end, that price is the end of his innocence that leads to a mother-son relationship that, according to Shug, “everyone does.” I would hardly call this uplifting. Downright depressing is more like it.

But my word, can Woodrell write. Yeah, this may be a more modern play on some Shakespeare theme, and according to some reviews Woodrell is compared to Faulkner (almost embarrassed to admit that I’ve never read anything by Faulkner, but may have to now). But, boys and girls, for lights out story telling, Woodrell is damn hard to beat. I’ll be venturing back to the Ozarks again real soon.

East Coast Don