Fiction: A no-hope husband and father goes missing leaving his wife and children. Not only has he abandoned them, he has skipped bail in the process ensuring they will lose their home, such as it is. The wife is not doing much about it. She sits in an old rocking chair, firmly fixed in a twilight zone, leaving her daughter, Ree, 16 years old and already toughened by the ordeal of living, to save them all, while giving her two younger brothers some idea that there actually is a thing called hope.
Set during winter in a valley in the harsh Ozark landscape, probably along the Missouri/Arkansas border, this is a brutal, physical, almost Shakespearean story that smells so real it hurts. Missouri-born Woodrell in his outstanding eighth novel has clawed tight into the heart of a clan, with the unlikely name of Dolly, that shows no mercy to anyone yet abides by a terrifying form of loyalty. Ree's preview of what time has to offer her has been her parent's marriage. Jessup, her father, has come and gone, and often is with another woman.
Meanwhile, Mom, once a beauty, has had her fun to such an extent that one of Ree's brothers has a different father. Mom is "lost to the present" and sits quietly, "wearing a small lingering smile prompted by something vaguely nice going on inside her head". Central to the story is the house itself which emerges as both sanctuary and prison and is vividly evoked by the taut descriptive prose that drives this gut-wrenching book like a fist, ". . . the ceilings were high, and the single light overhead threw dour shadows behind everything. Warped shadow-shapes lay all across the floor and walls and bulged in the corners. The house was cool in the bright spots and chill in the shadows . . . The furniture came into the house when Mamaw and Grandad Bromont were alive, had been in use since Mom was a child, and the lumpy stuffing and worn fabric yet held the scent of Grandad's pipe tobacco and ten thousand dusty days."
It is all told through a strong, detached third-person voice, more of a report than a narrative, largely because the characters do most of the talking. The exchanges are short, and to the point. The only real tenderness of equals is shared between Ree and her pal Gail, already a mother and hastily married to a boy whom she knows is in love with another girl. But Ree is sympathetic to her lost mother and shows no rage against her father.
Her main concern is to find him. There is also the mother role the girl has had to adopt towards her brothers. This is handled very well by Woodrell, who could have turned Ree into a do-gooder. Instead she is fair and practical, intent on saving her brothers, finding them food, but also helping them survive as individuals. "Ree's grand hope was that these boys would not be dead to wonder by the age of twelve, dulled to life, empty of kindness, boiling with mean." The sheer level of aggression that undercuts the narrative is both surreal and utterly believable. Woodrell controls every utterance, every gesture.
These characters are defined by their collective history, the hurts, the insults and even the physical detritus that litters their yards and houses: "She found heelless shoes still wrinkled from the feet of relatives who were dead before she could've known them."
Nature itself appears to be hitting out. When Ree goes outside to cut the kindling her father should have prepared, the snow hits her. It "fell in hard little bits, frosty white bits blown sideways to pelt Ree's face as she raised the ax , swung down, raised it again, splitting wood while being stung by cold flung from the sky." Later the wind is referred to as having "heaved" as it "knocked" the hood from her head.
Whatever about the weather, the humans do far more damage. Ree remembers being very small when she witnessed her father being shot in the chest. In her mind the incident is imprinted, including that "instead of driving to a doctor he drove 30 miles to West Table and the Tiny Spot Tavern to show his assembled buddies the glamorous bullet hole and the blood bubbling." Woodrell inhabits her mind yet it is not intrusive and it enables him to describe events in a language, which although Ree would not use it, is true to the narrative.
It becomes obvious that her father is now dead, but to prove this for the courts, she must find the body. This quest proves dangerous, it develops into a series of physical tests.
The violence exceeds anything that Cormac McCarthy has devised because it is far less theatrical. Woodrell's approach is far less apocalyptic. Also the staccato grace of his prose avoids the occasional jarring impact that Annie Proulx often delivers. Woodrell's linguistic register is more controlled than Proulx's; because he is more deliberate he does not have to resort to the grotesque as she often does.
Winter's Bone is something of a masterclass without the self-consciousness that surfaces at times in Proulx and increasingly in McCarthy.
Ree's search leads to some of her more difficult relatives. The ritual beating she receives courtesy of a trio of middle-aged females defies all reason yet is felt, absorbed by the reader.
"The other women closed in with boots to the shins while more heavy whacks landed and Ree felt her joints unglue, become loose, and she was draining somehow, draining to the dirt, while black wings flying angles crossed her mind, and there were mutters of beasts uncaged from women and she was sunk to a moaning place, kicked into silence. Words were reaching her but none that she understood."
The writing holds the reader like a tiger's stare.
By the time her father's body is discovered and part of it salvaged for evidence, there are no further shocks, precisely because the novel has operated at a consistently sustained level of physical and moral shock. The mother's withdrawal from life provides the central thesis - one either steps out, or engages. All the while Ree is becoming a remarkable character, more of a battler than either a hero or a saint. At no time does the novel become a parable.
It is exactly what Woodrell intended it to be - a real life story. Here is a visceral novel of convincing brutal realism, which possesses all the power and cunning of a great short story - the ultimate praise.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Winter's Bone By Daniel Woodrell Sceptre , 193pp. £12.99
