The Death of Sweet Mister [Paperback]

As with the previous "Tomato Red", this one is well-written and wondrous in the simple, unadorned tone of the narration. However both of these books are difficult to gush over.

These are dark gems. And they lack the allure that the common reader expects.

When we are moved to feel joy or sorrow by an author, we have no trouble considering that genius is involved. With Woodrell though, the emotions are more complex. And he can stir up things which we might prefer to have left hidden and forgotten.

This is definitely genius. Especially when someone such as Woodrell accomplishes this with a subtlety that is remarkably profound.

In this book, we are given the sad story of thirteen-year-old, overweight Shug Atkins. His is about the furthest thing from an "aw shucks" coming-of-age tale you can get.

Shug and his mother Glenda live in a shack on the grounds of the cemetery they maintain. Here they are plagued by the abusive Red. Red may or may not be Shug's biological father -- he probably isn't but this has never been made clear to Shug. Despite that, Red acts the father role and displays some of the most despicable ways possible for a grown man -- he is definitely an inappropriate role model.

Glenda has always relied on her looks even though they haven't gotten her very far. She's about little more than sex and as age advances has little in her life but maintaining an anaesthetic level of drunkenness. Far from being a perfect mother, she is still Shug's most likely ally -- a relationship that has all the possibilities for the perverse one can imagine.

Shug's world is full of dysfunction. He has been exposed to drug and alcohol abuse, hardened criminality, illicit sexual behavior and all manner of wickedness. But he doesn't know any better. And in the course of this novel, things go from bad to worse. In the end, the situation is beyond help.

Where "Tomato Red" impressed me with a story of what tragedy might happen when people fail to follow society's norms, this book shows what happens to people who live by the norms and meet tragedy by tangling with people who do not play by those rules.

I felt stunned after reading this book. Honestly. I sat and thought about it and couldn't shake it. It was like having heard a bomb go off nearby -- too close to feel secure.

This is certainly a remarkable book.

Shugg aka "Morris" aka Sweet Mister is fat and thirteen, a bit of an outcast with his peers (because he's fat? poor? at the bottom of the poor white trash social scale? -- we don't know.) Shugg, our narrator is bright, quick, and a pragmatist through and through. He goes along to get along. His only champion is his mother Glenda, a pretty lady whose looks didn't get her very far, whose only weapons are persistent sensuousness and an ever-present silver thermos containing rum-laced "tea." Shugg's nominal father (probably not) is Red Akins, a cruel, brutal, truly evil man whose purpose in life is drinking, drugging and make certain Shugg and Glenda's lives were spent in abject humiliation. Red is not smart, but he is a shrewd and cunning, formidable foe. "Foe" is the wrong word for Red; you'd no more oppose him than an evil force of nature. I once read of an Australian Wandering Spider, one of the most venomous spiders in the world who is so aggressive that if you try to kill him, say with a broom, he climbs right up the broom handle and goes after you, and isn't satisfied with one bite--he keeps on biting till he's through. Red is a subhuman Wandering Spider.

Red and his pal Basil drag Shugg with them to steal drugs from terminally ill people and doctors' offices, the theory being if Shugg gets caught, as a juvenile, he will only be reprimanded. Shugg complies in his sheer terror of Red, and descriptions of this overweight, clumsy boy trying to be a second story man are both pathetic and ironically funny. What Shugg lacks in physical aptitude, he makes up for in clever quick wittedness far beyond anything Red would understand.

When Glenda has a torrid affair with a man who has a green T-Bird, the inexorable tragedy must play itself out. Everyone is in place: murderous Red, loyal Basil, and Shugg who has been taught to love his mother too much and knows he has not a song, but a scream, in his heart. Glenda's Sweet Mister is gone.

Woodrell is powerful, concise and unsparing. "Death of Sweet Mister'" is compelling, well-written, but not for everyone. With a tragedy, there are no alternate endings.

-sweetmolly-Amazon Reviewer