Beyond Twisted Sorrow: The Promise of Country Noir from Jay A. Gertzman & Down and Out Books, 2022
Review by Kurt Brokaw
One sure way to steer you to Gertzman’s scholarly history is to hold up the cover of one of the New York Times five best novels of 2022 (Demon Copperhead), by a name publisher (Harper) and a world class Pulitzer Prize nominated author (Barbara Kingsolver), and make this appeal: “If you’d like more than a heads-up on all the fiction and non-fiction of rural Appalachia that Kingsolver’s novel is standing on the shoulders of, this Gertzman volume is for you.” It’s half the length (260 pages vs. Kingsolver’s 560 pages) published by an indie imprint (Down and Out Books, that seems to have sprung from plundered earth to publish authors like Gertzman), and covers an entire literary universe. Whereas Kingsolver’s red-haired 80s youth and title character is a hardscrabble kid born to a teen junkie in a Virginia trailer, located “between a coal camp and a settlement people call Right Poor.” Why settle for one lone tale when you can own a whole library exploring a plethora of literary and filmic ancestors of Demon?
Gertzsman starts his history around 1820 with James Fennimore Cooper’s frontier series, a quarter century before Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, which is the origin novel of Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Gertzman’s history widens the lens to roam and comb the annals of victimization, pausing to deconstruct its many victims. They start as homesteaders, cowboys, fur trappers and native Americans, and through time morph into isolates of all ages, ethnicities and disrupted careers, These days they’re factory discards who migrate together in RV caravans to live out their lives–Chloe Zhao celebrated this latest generation In her Oscar-winning movie, Nomadland. Gertzman’s “twisted sorrow” people (the apt phrase is borrowed from Dylan) mostly reside outside the city’s mean streets. Their roots lie in mountains, deserts, plains, on the outskirts and on the wrong side of the tracks in busted towns across America’s heartland. People in country noir balance their marginalized lives on those hardscrabble edges between civilization’s dollar stores and wide open wilderness where families still fish and hunt their dinners. The authors would fill a grit lit stack of journals in any bookstore worth its name, and chances are, like this reader, you won’t know more than a few of them. Cooper, Stephen Crane, Owen Wister, Bret Hardt and Bertha B.M. Bowers dealt the first hands. Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry and Harry Crews’ novels along with Flannery O’Connor and Annie Proulx's stories may be on your shelves. You might have them next to your wild, wooly and woodsy writings of pros like Jonathan Raban, Edward Hoagland and Bruce Chatwin, three more keepers you discovered growing up. Willa Cather, Robert Coover, James Sallis, Rudy Wurlitzer and Barry Gifford hover close enough that you can cite them as old friends you haven’t read for a while. But the Appalachian stories of Breece D.J. Pancake are more likely to come your way via a sharp-eyed used/rare bookseller, and how many of those are left? Ditto Oakley Hall’s Warlock, considered by western pulp fans to be a frontier novel of delicacy and savagery superior to Jack Schafer’s Shane and Alan LeMay’s The Searchers. And the minute you start deep-diving into writers like Daniel Woodrell, Chris Offutt, Denis Johnson, John Williams, S.A Cosby, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Larry Brown, Leah Hampton, Sheldon Lee Compton, Tom Franklin and John G. Cavelti, you need to cling to Gertzman’s volume like Elmer’s Glue.
Another reason is Down and Out’s cover design by Margo Nauert. Margo must be familiar with true-crime slicks of the 1930s and 40s. Unlike hardboiled pulp magazines, true crime magazines often used “as-told-to” narratives, in which some backwater county sheriff dishes out a rural holdup, kidnapping or killing he solved, and a professional writer puts it together. This is how Jim Thompson (whose dad was a backwater county sheriff) got his start, crafting a dozen nonfiction tales in slicks like Daring Detective and Master Detective, They were cold and clinical enough articles to prompt Stanley Kubrick to admire Thompson’s penultimate novel The Killer Inside Me, as “probably the most chilling and believable first person account of a criminally warped mind that I have ever encountered.” Thompson was the only crime noir writer of the 20th century who wrote for the slicks and never for the pulps. The only one. Jim even occasionally posed as the body In the ditch, or the canoe. Sometimes Jim’s mother posed as the body in the ditch, or the canoe. The only thing Ms. Nauert’s brilliantly sorry-ass cover photo is missing is a heel or shoe laying in the bottom of a canoe. Make no mistake, Jim Thompson is the late lamented Godfather of gothic country noir.
It’s authors like the above, along with their socio/economic/political influences, that separate Gertzman’s Beyond Twisted Sorrow from Imogen Sara Smith’s excellent In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond The City, published a decade ago. Imogen wades wider and deeper into country noir in movies than anyone else you can read. Gertzman gives you the writers. (Not that he totally ignores film noir; there are astute Gertzman dissections of Dorothy B. Hughes’ Ride the Pink Horse, an odd item directed by and starring Robert Montgomery fooling around with Wanda Hendrix in Mexico, and Sam Ross’ He Ran All The Way, with Shelley Winters watching John Garfield dying in an urban gutter after she plugs him. Gertzman also gives close attention to same sex country noirs on the big screen like Brokeback Mountain and Power of the Dog) Smith’s m.o. might be summed up as “the street never lets you go" while Gertzman’s m.o. Is “the ridgerunner and the ridge never let you go.” Both film noir and country noir deal not just with alienated, locked-and-loaded loners, but slightly more together ‘Bent Heros’–deeply flawed women and men who keep playing the red card just to see the black turn up, again and again and again. Yet they persist. One of Gertzman’s welcoming lines upfront is the profoundly simple idea, “We’re all Americans.” Yet it’s an America in which, as William Holden grimly suggests to his hardcase riders in The Wild Bunch, “history’s closin’ on us fast.” That’s where all the Twisted Sorrow comes in–when history closes way too fast, into an endless loop of stories and novels of unforgettable characters caught “on the border between freedom and isolation.” There they sit, hunkered down with all their resources boozed or doped away, and all their resourcefulness stretched to the breaking point…and beyond. Gertzman honors them all, saluting each and every broken heart.
Brokaw is senior film critic of The Independent (Independent-magazine.org).
You can find a link to get your copy of Gertzman's BEYOND TWISTED SORROW at Down and Out's page.
Review by Kurt Brokaw
One sure way to steer you to Gertzman’s scholarly history is to hold up the cover of one of the New York Times five best novels of 2022 (Demon Copperhead), by a name publisher (Harper) and a world class Pulitzer Prize nominated author (Barbara Kingsolver), and make this appeal: “If you’d like more than a heads-up on all the fiction and non-fiction of rural Appalachia that Kingsolver’s novel is standing on the shoulders of, this Gertzman volume is for you.” It’s half the length (260 pages vs. Kingsolver’s 560 pages) published by an indie imprint (Down and Out Books, that seems to have sprung from plundered earth to publish authors like Gertzman), and covers an entire literary universe. Whereas Kingsolver’s red-haired 80s youth and title character is a hardscrabble kid born to a teen junkie in a Virginia trailer, located “between a coal camp and a settlement people call Right Poor.” Why settle for one lone tale when you can own a whole library exploring a plethora of literary and filmic ancestors of Demon?
Gertzsman starts his history around 1820 with James Fennimore Cooper’s frontier series, a quarter century before Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, which is the origin novel of Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Gertzman’s history widens the lens to roam and comb the annals of victimization, pausing to deconstruct its many victims. They start as homesteaders, cowboys, fur trappers and native Americans, and through time morph into isolates of all ages, ethnicities and disrupted careers, These days they’re factory discards who migrate together in RV caravans to live out their lives–Chloe Zhao celebrated this latest generation In her Oscar-winning movie, Nomadland. Gertzman’s “twisted sorrow” people (the apt phrase is borrowed from Dylan) mostly reside outside the city’s mean streets. Their roots lie in mountains, deserts, plains, on the outskirts and on the wrong side of the tracks in busted towns across America’s heartland. People in country noir balance their marginalized lives on those hardscrabble edges between civilization’s dollar stores and wide open wilderness where families still fish and hunt their dinners. The authors would fill a grit lit stack of journals in any bookstore worth its name, and chances are, like this reader, you won’t know more than a few of them. Cooper, Stephen Crane, Owen Wister, Bret Hardt and Bertha B.M. Bowers dealt the first hands. Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry and Harry Crews’ novels along with Flannery O’Connor and Annie Proulx's stories may be on your shelves. You might have them next to your wild, wooly and woodsy writings of pros like Jonathan Raban, Edward Hoagland and Bruce Chatwin, three more keepers you discovered growing up. Willa Cather, Robert Coover, James Sallis, Rudy Wurlitzer and Barry Gifford hover close enough that you can cite them as old friends you haven’t read for a while. But the Appalachian stories of Breece D.J. Pancake are more likely to come your way via a sharp-eyed used/rare bookseller, and how many of those are left? Ditto Oakley Hall’s Warlock, considered by western pulp fans to be a frontier novel of delicacy and savagery superior to Jack Schafer’s Shane and Alan LeMay’s The Searchers. And the minute you start deep-diving into writers like Daniel Woodrell, Chris Offutt, Denis Johnson, John Williams, S.A Cosby, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Larry Brown, Leah Hampton, Sheldon Lee Compton, Tom Franklin and John G. Cavelti, you need to cling to Gertzman’s volume like Elmer’s Glue.
Another reason is Down and Out’s cover design by Margo Nauert. Margo must be familiar with true-crime slicks of the 1930s and 40s. Unlike hardboiled pulp magazines, true crime magazines often used “as-told-to” narratives, in which some backwater county sheriff dishes out a rural holdup, kidnapping or killing he solved, and a professional writer puts it together. This is how Jim Thompson (whose dad was a backwater county sheriff) got his start, crafting a dozen nonfiction tales in slicks like Daring Detective and Master Detective, They were cold and clinical enough articles to prompt Stanley Kubrick to admire Thompson’s penultimate novel The Killer Inside Me, as “probably the most chilling and believable first person account of a criminally warped mind that I have ever encountered.” Thompson was the only crime noir writer of the 20th century who wrote for the slicks and never for the pulps. The only one. Jim even occasionally posed as the body In the ditch, or the canoe. Sometimes Jim’s mother posed as the body in the ditch, or the canoe. The only thing Ms. Nauert’s brilliantly sorry-ass cover photo is missing is a heel or shoe laying in the bottom of a canoe. Make no mistake, Jim Thompson is the late lamented Godfather of gothic country noir.
It’s authors like the above, along with their socio/economic/political influences, that separate Gertzman’s Beyond Twisted Sorrow from Imogen Sara Smith’s excellent In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond The City, published a decade ago. Imogen wades wider and deeper into country noir in movies than anyone else you can read. Gertzman gives you the writers. (Not that he totally ignores film noir; there are astute Gertzman dissections of Dorothy B. Hughes’ Ride the Pink Horse, an odd item directed by and starring Robert Montgomery fooling around with Wanda Hendrix in Mexico, and Sam Ross’ He Ran All The Way, with Shelley Winters watching John Garfield dying in an urban gutter after she plugs him. Gertzman also gives close attention to same sex country noirs on the big screen like Brokeback Mountain and Power of the Dog) Smith’s m.o. might be summed up as “the street never lets you go" while Gertzman’s m.o. Is “the ridgerunner and the ridge never let you go.” Both film noir and country noir deal not just with alienated, locked-and-loaded loners, but slightly more together ‘Bent Heros’–deeply flawed women and men who keep playing the red card just to see the black turn up, again and again and again. Yet they persist. One of Gertzman’s welcoming lines upfront is the profoundly simple idea, “We’re all Americans.” Yet it’s an America in which, as William Holden grimly suggests to his hardcase riders in The Wild Bunch, “history’s closin’ on us fast.” That’s where all the Twisted Sorrow comes in–when history closes way too fast, into an endless loop of stories and novels of unforgettable characters caught “on the border between freedom and isolation.” There they sit, hunkered down with all their resources boozed or doped away, and all their resourcefulness stretched to the breaking point…and beyond. Gertzman honors them all, saluting each and every broken heart.
Brokaw is senior film critic of The Independent (Independent-magazine.org).
You can find a link to get your copy of Gertzman's BEYOND TWISTED SORROW at Down and Out's page.