Review: "Tomato Red" by Daniel Woodrell

I hate to be the one to give a somewhat poor review of a book by someone I really, really respect, but Daniel Woodrell’s Tomato Red really fell flat for me, and it pains me to say such a thing. He is such an underdog in American writing, and feel he deserves heaping amounts of praise for when he is doing quality work, but this book does not fall into that category. Maybe it is because I changed my reading schedule for the rest of the year to read the entire catalogues of writers I really like and did not let enough time pass before reading another one of his books after The Outlaw Album, but I felt this book lacked a certain amount of emotional drive that made The Death of Sweet Mister such an emotional thrill ride. The great prose is there, as it always is, but there isn’t much else. It starts off really good, narrated by drifter Sammy Barlach whose current stop is in Woodrell’s infamous Ozarks in a place called Venus Holler, where he takes up with a group of criminals and begins to take out his frustrations on a mansion they break into. It uses this violent and aggressive image to convey the plight of life’s losers and the impossibility of change in a stunning and eye-opening fashion, only to lose balance once Jamalee and her brother Jason are introduced. Jamalee, whose red hair is where the book gets it’s title, desperately wants out of Venus Holler, and sees her ambiguously sexual brother as an opportunity, and Sammy as there ticket out. It never fully comes to fruition, leading to the typical violent Woodrell ending that pales in comparison to the devastating final pages of Sweet Mister. Chock it up to other things on my mind, but Tomato Red is a dud.

Rating: 3/5