Sun 18 Aug 2024
Reviewed by Tony Baer: DAVID GOODIS – Retreat from Oblivion.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[8] Comments
DAVID GOODIS – Retreat from Oblivion. E.P. Dutton, hardcover, 1939. To be published in paperback by Stark House Press, paperback, October, 2024. (See comments.)
Peyton Place meets WWII. Extramarital affairs between friends and neighbors in the rising middle bracket of Manhattan, circa 1939.
Herb and wife Jean, they’re a pretty bad scene. Jean’s screwing Herb’s friend Paul. And frankly, Jean dear, he don’t give a damn.
Then Jean gets preggers and Paul heads with her to China to become a fighter pilot against the Japanese. Which is good for the reader because Goodis can really write a good pulpy aviation yarn (given his record of selling air adventure stories to the aviation pulps).
As Jean absconds with Paul, Herb’s on the make. He’s feeling reckless (was just at a go-kart track with a list of rules including ‘no wreckless driving’. The ‘w’ in ‘wreckless’ still visible through the white-out). Herb heads to Harlem and starts following a very attractive Italian looking girl. She stops and recommends the prostitutes one street over. He says he just needs someone to talk to. And it turns out, so does she.
Her name’s Dorothy. Her husband is fighting the fascists in Spain. So now Herb feels guilty and can’t sleep with her. Even though she first tells him it’s okay and later begs for it.
More good news for the reader. Dorothy’s hubbie being in the Spanish Civil War allows Goodis to write alternating chapters teleporting the reader from Peyton Place to the war in Spain with plenty of battle scenes for the losing cause.
So that’s the picture. Peyton Place melodrama montaged with wartime atrocities.
What it could have amounted is a critique of the hypocritical Manhattan high-life where everybody’s trying to screw their neighbor in every way they can, whilst elsewhere people are heroically facing death and destruction.
Yet when the time comes to hammer this point home, Goodis settles for the Hollywood ending. Perhaps seeking a Hollywood ending for himself, picturing himself in pictures, retreating from the existential oblivion that would hound him til the end.
August 18th, 2024 at 7:22 pm
Steve,
Has this book ever been reprinted in paperback??
I’d probably only give it a try if I could get a copy on the cheap, even though I’m a big advocate of Goodis. His aviation pulp stories never did much for me, although neither did his crime stories in the pulps.
Tony, thanks for the good review!
August 18th, 2024 at 7:27 pm
Paul,
Stark House is reprinting it later this year. I think October.
Tony
August 18th, 2024 at 9:01 pm
Good news from Stark House. I had no idea!
August 19th, 2024 at 3:22 am
There’s something magnetic about Goodis’ novels.He celebrates the common man–and even the sub-common — as a pulp-Hero. Where Hemingway and Steinbeck write of the landless & luckless as Noble Savages and suffering saints, Goodis turns them into the stuff of Adventure.
August 19th, 2024 at 1:55 pm
Nicely stated!
August 20th, 2024 at 3:14 am
Goodis’ personal life in early 20th c. Philadelphia is fascinating to me. His assuming responsibility for his mentally-impaired brother; his late-night bar-crawls; his intellectual property lawsuit (towards the close of his life).
Late 1800s-early 1900s Philadelphia/Pennsylvania in general, was something of a minor watershed in pulp lit’s early beginnings.
There was a lurid white-trafficking dime serial set in the racially-tense “Gray’s Ferry” neighborhood; another famous potboiler of the day, was set in central PA (re: Molly Maquires).
Goodis certainly has his place in the tradition of craftsmanship which developed in that commonwealth.
August 22nd, 2024 at 10:05 am
Mainstream novel with the core theme of the consequences of truth vs. lies affecting the success of relationships. Well resolved per characterizations drawn, e. g. happy ending seems logical and not tacked on.
Social consciousness elements, wars and the Homefront pre-WWII was interesting and would have been more so when Goodis wrote this. A lot of good (and moving) writing and I think at this point, Goodis may have been still been reflecting influences, e. g. Fitzgerald: the male-female dialogue, disconnections between the sexes, logical enough in an author’s early work. Some good humor: banter scenes between Miss Gillen & Dorothy, Dorothy and Herb scenes: humor overlays the agony lying between them as Herb cannot commit to Dorothy while Tommy dominates her psyche.
There are some hints of the later Goodis in this, but this work is certainly more subtle and craft self-conscious than much of the later works. I felt the Paul-Wilda-Jean triangle would have been handled much differently in later Goodis, with all the lies ending in despair for all, instead of for just one. Herb is the master of bad spur of the moment decisions (classic noir kernel) – he seems adrift in a world he has no real connection with at any level – and yet comes out a winner and relatively unscathed. In later Goodis, he would not get off so easy.
Hopefully people will accept the book on its own terms, an entertaining social context romance with some fine writing.
August 23rd, 2024 at 9:24 pm
Goodis early works feel like a tug of war between his instinct to write a popular novel and his darker vision of the world, or at least what it would develop into.
Here he almost has it both ways but opts for a brighter vision. I suppose it is ultimately justified, particularly for what fairly clearly seems to be a bid for a shot at being optioned by Hollywood.
I think the book ultimately works and that is the only justification any writer needs particularly one as good as Goodis. I can’t help wondering though if this had been written in 1946 instead of 1939 if Goodis would have felt freer to end it on a darker note and still make his bid for popular success.