Wed 2 Dec 2009
Reviewed by Mike Dennis: DAVID GOODIS – The Blonde on the Street Corner.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[7] Comments
DAVID GOODIS – The Blonde on the Street Corner. Lion #186, paperback original; 1st printing, 1954. UK edition: Serpent’s Tail, softcover, 1998.
“Ralph stood on the corner, leaning against the brick wall of Silver’s candy store, telling himself to go home and get some sleep.”
That’s the opening line of The Blonde On The Street Corner, a 1954 novel written by David Goodis. Of course, Ralph doesn’t go home. Instead, he spots a blonde across the dark street and gawks at her. She eventually calls him over to light her cigarette, which he does.
Now, at this point, one might expect that Ralph would be lured into a tight web spun by this dazzling femme fatale, resulting in his eventual moral destruction, if not death. But Goodis doesn’t write that way. In fact, the blonde is fat, sharp-tongued, and lives in the neighborhood. Ralph knows her, and knows that she’s married. She propositions him right on the corner, but he rejects her. “I don’t mess around with married women,” he tells her. Then he goes home.
Much to the reader’s surprise, this encounter does not trigger the plot of the novel. In fact, it would be right to say that the novel has no plot, in the usual sense. Ralph returns to his impoverished Philadelphia home and spends the rest of the book wallowing in misery with his friends, all of whom are in the same boat as he: in their thirties, usually unemployed, and filled with unrealistic dreams.
One of his friends says he is a “songwriter,” but no one has ever recorded any of his songs. Another wants to be a big-league baseball player, but lasted only a week on a class D minor league team.
They spend most of their time leaning up against buildings, wearing only thin coats against the bitter Philadelphia winter, and wishing they had more money. They talk a good deal about going to Florida, where they can get jobs as bellmen in a “big-time hotel,” convinced this would jump-start their desperate lives.
The book goes on like this pretty much all the way through, with no moving story line, but it’s Goodis’s prose that keeps you riveted to the page. No one can paint a picture of a hopeless world better than he can.
For Goodis, Philadelphia is a desolate place, whose bleak streets offer little in the way of promise. Many of his novels were set there, and they all shared that common trait. Life in that city is, for him and his characters, usually an exercise in futility.
These are people who walk around with twenty or thirty cents in their pockets, who cold-call girls out of the phone book asking for dates, and for whom escape to Florida is always right around the corner. The finale provides the mortal body blow to Ralph, stripping him of the last shred of his dignity.
The Blonde On The Street Corner is a potent novel, filled with the passions and despair of its characters. All through this book, you find yourself longing to run into characters whose lives mean something. Then, you realize there aren’t any.
December 2nd, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Living near Philadelphia most of my life I’m aware of how heartless and desolate it can appear. Goodis had a point and things haven’t changed 55 years later. I just read a newspaper report of a man who was having a heart attack in Philly. He went to the emergency room and over an hour later died while still in the waiting room. Three other patients sitting near him then proceeded to rob him. The City of Brotherly Love….
December 2nd, 2009 at 7:36 pm
I’m sure if Goodis were in that emergency room, Walker, he’d have found a novel somewhere in that incident.
Most of his novels were set in Philadelphia. If you’re not familiar with him, you might enjoy reading one or two of them. Nobody can take you down those mean Philly streets better than he can
December 2nd, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Goodis is very close to being the equal of Woolrich, a writer that only just misses being one of the true greats.
There was recently a good deal of talk about Jim Thompson’s work here, but I would argue Thompson was extremely superficial compared to Goodis, whose bleak vision ran deep and true and was tragically never allowed to reach its full literary bloom.
But he came close. Damn close. Reading Goodis isn’t always a pleasure, but it is always a powerful experience.
December 2nd, 2009 at 8:54 pm
My opinion is that Goodis is a better overall writer than Jim Thompson. I’d be interested to see other readers of this blog vote for their “favorite” Goodis novel. Mine is “Black Friday,” a novel that starts out bleak and just goes deeper and darker down the Noir hole. While I’m at it, my favorite Thompson novel is “The Getaway.” Most people I talk to about it have never read it, they just comment on the movie adaptations, which only films approx. 75% of the novel. It’s got the strangest ending of any crime novel I’ve read.
December 2nd, 2009 at 10:17 pm
My favorite Thompson is admittedly an offbeat one. Texas By the Tail, a rare humorous outing that I think shows off some of Thompson’s less obvious skills. But of the main body of his work I’d have to pick The Grifters.
As for Goodis, I think my favorite is Nightfall, which is one of his mainstream suspense novels and an excellent example of the form. Good movie too.
That said I have to agree with Paul about The Getaway.
December 3rd, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Favorite Goodis: STREET OF NO RETURN which uses a wino as an out-and-out adventure hero, who saves the City but makes no progress on his own terms.
Yes, the ending of Thompson’s THE GETAWAY is indeed unsettling, but someone (Paramount, Peckinpah or Steve McQueen) didn’t have the ba*ls to film it. My personal favorite Thompson is SAVAGE NIGHT.
December 3rd, 2009 at 5:29 pm
David:
You hit the nail right on the head when you said reading Goodis isn’t always a pleasure, but it’s always powerful. I honestly don’t think I could say that about any other author.
Paul:
The gothic ending of “The Getaway” was probably unfilmable, and at best, incomprehensible to most of the movie-going public. And you’re right about “Black Friday”.
Dan:
Pretty good way of putting it. The wino as an adventure hero. That’s exactly what he was. And in true Goodis form, absolutely no lively sense of adventure.