Lightwood
By
Steph Post
Polis
Books
302
pp.
$15.99
Reviewed
by Jay A Gertzman
Steph
Post is a prime candidate for renown in her genre. The comparison
that comes to mind is with David Joy. His Where All Light Tends to
Go (Putnam’s, 2015) is similar to Post’s Lightwood in precisely
reported setting, tough but conflicted characters, dead mothers,
sustaining and/or hindering loved ones, help from unexpected places,
injured self-respect, a need for adventure, and bloodletting reaching
toward Grand Guignol depths. In addition to all these rudiments of
20th-century pulp noir, both writers give their
protagonists’ struggles for independence from community and family
ties an almost biblical intensity. Maybe that helps explain the
similarity in their names, Judah and Jacob.
Judah
Cannon’s surname reflects Genesis 29:35. Judah (“praise”), was
a founder of a new family line; his father was Jacob; King David and
Christ were descendants. Post’s Judah—when we first meet him—is
in no such position, because he is too loyal to the values he has
received growing up in Silas, a hardscrabble Florida town that has
been stagnant for a generation. Empty storefronts, weekend
assignations,
and weaponry stockpiled for the End of Days reflect resignation to a
moral code that, in its strictly enforced absolutism, has become
shabby. For example, Judah has stayed helpful to his estranged,
contemptuous wife, and to his bullying father, because he has been
taught men do not abandon family. Unlike his girlfriend Ramey, he
has not learned to prioritize self-respect over self-defeating
obligation. Thus, he accepts his wife’s demand that he not see
their child.
Post’s
themes preclude backgrounding the dignity of rural Americans’
creative perseverance, as do not only Breece Pancake, Chris Offutt
(Kentucky Straight), Bonnie Jo Campbell (American Salvage),
and Carolyn Chute, but also Martin McDonagh in his film Three
Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. In contrast, Ramey and
Judah make a stark contrast to their fellow citizens in Silas, whose
beaten-down resignation is evident in their TV binging, their heavy
drinking, and their need for firearms to protect their property.
Judah
had just finished a 3-year prison sentence, taking the rap for a
Cannon family theft from the Scorpions, a slap-dash and vicious gang
of bikers dealing in cocaine. His father, Sherwood, has told him,
“without family, you got nothing. But with family, you got
everything. . . .” He said this “with a dangerous scowl,” one
people have learned is a dire warning.
Judah’s
younger brother, Benji, has not become embittered or resentful. He
has an easy-going friendliness. He takes after his mother. (Her
death, like that of Joy’s protagonist’s, produced a grief both
men must bury; the pain still eats at them and possibly is a factor
in their fathers’ cruelty.) Benji is dragged to the point of death
by the Scorpions to scare Sherwood into giving back the drug money
(which of course does not happen). At this point Judah confesses his
guilt for Benji’s near-fatal torture. “I went along with it,
again.” He states this in a public place. Why would he do that? To
survive any crisis takes self-respect. That comes as a result of
confidence, which in turn comes with experience. Where do you learn
those traits, in an isolated small town, where your own father and
brother stop you from doing so, and beat the crap out of you if you
start to? “Stupid, cowardly worm, who can’t even think for
himself.” Now he starts to.
Judah’s
unaccustomed outburst endangers Sherwood’s plans. He’s growing
up, and Sherwood and his brother Levi pound him bloody for it. Ramey,
who Sherwood admits “has some balls” (interesting but unlikely
observation), helps by pulling a gun to stop the beating. One trait
of noir literature is trust and courage emerging from unlikely
places.
Ramey
and Judah not only sleep together; they dream together, of an
independent future, one where the strengths of rural life can revive
out of the coffin of obedience to authorities like Sherwood. Judah
must find the clue to how to channel his ability to think for himself
into independence of heart and soul. Ramey has already done so. “She
was … desperately trying to be the woman her own mother never had
the courage to be.” “I’ve always been my own. But I think,”
she tells Judah, “we carry a part of each other. Always have.
Always will.” What she will never do is become a brittle,
disposable object such as lightwood.
A
prime noir characteristic is extreme violence. That is provided not
only by what happens to Benji, but by a Grand Guignol all by herself,
Sister Tulah, fire and brimstone preacher with a captive congregation
she terrifies with starvation, sensory overload, and demands for
tithes they dare not withhold. It’s as if she has emerged as the
ultimate monster that Sherwood and the bikers had unwittingly
conjured up from hell. Her weird pale eyes hide an essential
emptiness of the least drop of humanity. She fears only snakes, I
suppose in deference to her boss, Satan. He is the only one, she
might think, powerful enough to make her suffer as she has done to
her own acolytes.
I
don’t know of many similar characters in contemporary rural noir. I
think of Jim Thompson’s deformed Ruthie in Savage Night, who leads
Little Bigger, hit man extraordinaire, to a death that “tastes
good.” The shack where it all goes down, way down, has a sign in
the yard: “The way of the transgressor is hard.”
Sherwood
and Tula have to work together to find the stolen money. It is needed
by a phosphate corporation to bribe local politicians. In a powerful
denouement, securing that money becomes Sherwood’s baptism of fire.
Tulah remains. Judah and Ramey wind up with the filthy lucre his
father has accumulated. On to Walk in the Fire. Obviously,
fire has many implications, both hellish and cleansing.
Post’s
novel exemplifies a fascinating contrast between classic and
contemporary noir. In the former, those who, like Bigger in Savage
Night, or Lou Ford in The
Killer Inside Me, embrace absolute megalomaniacal control
end in literal fire. It tastes good, or they laugh. (For another
scary example, see Charles Williams’ The
Hot Spot). Protagonists in Woolrich, Goodis, Gil Brewer,
Margaret Millar, Dorothy Hughes, and Charles Williford bind
themselves to a malevolent fate they can only stoically accept. While
the difficulties of forging satisfying human connections are clear in
rural noir, the possibilities of securing mutuality can be realized,
and enjoyed. Perseverance is fulfilling, not simply the mark of a
noble loser. So it is in Woodrell, Bonnie Campbell, Denis Johnson,
Larry Brown, and Steph Post. Its radical nature has everything to do
with cleansing.
Jay Gertzman is the author of Pulp, According to David Goodis, which was nominated for best non-fiction study of the mystery genre for 2019. A Prof Emeritus at Mansfield University, his specialties are literary censorship, the publisher Samuel Roth, and 20th century mass market pulp crime fiction.
Jay Gertzman is the author of Pulp, According to David Goodis, which was nominated for best non-fiction study of the mystery genre for 2019. A Prof Emeritus at Mansfield University, his specialties are literary censorship, the publisher Samuel Roth, and 20th century mass market pulp crime fiction.