Review: Under the Bright Lights

Under the Bright Lights by Daniel Woodrell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Like a lot of people, I’m a big admirer of Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone. I teach it regularly in my noir fiction class, and I’m giving it a test run in my general introduction to literature class this semester. If you haven’t read it, I offer a top recommendation. It’s the best of what contemporary noir can be: understated in its language, it calls on a weakened character to rise to her best self on behalf of others. It’s an ethical interrogation of a community that works by reasonable and defined practices that, when they fall on Ree’s shoulders, become immoral.

This one, Woodrell’s first novel, has glimmers of what he’d become. There’s the occasional turn of phrase that rises above the conventions of the genre, and there’s a persistent sense that a misunderstood community – here a Cajun community in Gulf city that seems like New Orleans or a smaller fictional relation – does criminal things for reasons we outsiders can’t fully understand.

For the most part, though, this is a conventional noir, better than run-of-the-mill – notably better – but something that feels in retrospect like the apprentice work of someone who’d go on to become a master. When I compare this to the apprentice work of another noir master, James Ellroy, I find this a lot stronger than his Lloyd Hopkins work (which similarly gives evidence of the great work that would follow). In each case, though, I recommend starting with the best stuff and getting back to the early stuff only if you’re a completist.

The best example of what’s limited here requires a SPOILER: The end of this involves a boat chase through the swamp that has shaped this community. It’s a great concept, and I can imagine a fine movie growing out of it, but Woodrell handles it less deftly than he would the subtler and more compelling climax of Winter’s Bone. Here, for instance, we never really see the swamp before the climax. We get it hinted at before, but the climax here has to carry the burden of description and conclusion. It’s far from a failure, but it’s also less of a culmination than it might have been.

In similar fashion, there’s a potentially powerful relationship between our detective protagonist, Rene Shade, and his brother Tip. Even here, Woodrell writes dialogue with real skill, and many of the quiet scenes between them are effective. Woodrell doesn’t have the sustained focus here, though, that he does on Ree and her family in Winter’s Bone. Instead, we get the great insight of their relationship diminished by a series of other potentially powerful friendships, loyalties, and betrayals.

As a work of literature, this is better than a lot of the noir I still enjoy. (I’m thinking, for instance, of James Lee Burke, who also writes about the greater New Orleans community.) As a coherent detective narrative, though, it doesn’t quite come together.

Thankfully, it did come together – marrying the best of this to a tighter sense of plotting and more fully sustained attention to character relationships – for Woodrell. I enjoyed this enough to give the next one a shot (I’ve already got it as part of a re-released trilogy of Woodrell’s first novels) and I’m curious to know which work showed this talented writer going from good to great.


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