The genre of “country noir”
has many masters of the craft both living (Donald Ray Pollock and Tom Franklin
spring to mind immediately) and dead (you can see echoes of Larry Brown in
pretty much every novel or short story that can fit comfortably into the genre),
but it is genre whose confines I can see restricting, with the last few novels
I have come across being near carbon copies of each other: there is the wasted
potential of the protagonist, family bonds soaked in blood and, most of the
time, methamphetamine. Michael Farris Smith’s second novel, Desperation Road,
thankfully doesn’t have that last tired narrative device, but in the end, I
don’t think it will stand out from the pack. It is good though, a deeply
psychological and heartbreaking story of broken people whose lives are
bookmarked by violence, but it has been done before, and it is not nearly as
breathtaking as his debut novel, Rivers. It tells two stories that eventually
converge. One follows Maben and her daughter Annalee. They are drifting into a
small Mississippi town when, through a cruel twist of fate, Maben is forced to
shoot and kill a lecherous deputy. The more interesting thread concerns
Russell, recently released from prison who’s past mistakes are so fresh that
they meet him once he’s off the bus and throw him a beating. He was put away
when he killed someone while driving drunk, and is not doing a good job of
picking up the pieces in the wake of his release. These two stories converge,
in both the past and the present and in expected and unexpected ways. I’m
impressed by Smith’s prose, that is deep but not cloying, heartfelt but not
saccharine, but the story is one I’ve seen done before. It is done well here,
with a pseudo-villain just as pitiful as our two heroes, but it failed to light
my world on fire. This is a good, but not great novel from a talent a cut above
the rest in his field.
Rating: 4/5
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