Over the past few years, I have read enough books within the genre of country noir that I can confidently tell you I’m an expert of the genre: I can recognize familiar beats in stories, certain character types and a certain home grown, gritty style indicative of the genre well enough to notice deviations in a tired or true method and judge it good or bad. The genre has its high points, like Daniel Woodrell’s masterpiece The Death of Sweet Mister and Donald Ray Pollack’s The Heavenly Table and it’s lesser works like David Joy’s Where All Light Tends to Go and really, anything else Daniel Woodrell wrote. Bruce Holbert’s third novel Whiskey, rests somewhere in between. He possess Woodrell’s gift for rich yet humble prose that gives grace to savage and sadistic people but its narrative is too jumbled, too compact to really be as interesting beyond Holbert’s skilled use of language. The novel focuses on the lives of two brothers, Andre and Smoker, who, in 1991, are forced to travel in search of Smoker’s daughter when a familiar religious zealot kidnaps her. Spliced in with this account, which includes a trapped bear (which verges on the ridiculous to be honest) and a blown of finger mended with the barest essential is the story of Andre and Smoker’s lives before the book’s events, such as Andre’s tender yet caustic courtship of school teacher Claire, the ugly relationship between the brothers which gives poignancy to the book’s present day events and the violent relationship between their parent’s Pork and Peg (whose names, put together sound funny in a way I JUST noticed) which contains the stories most powerful section, which offers clues as to the book’s ending and shares similarities between another FSG MCD title (I let you find out). While it lacks a certain drive I expect from these stories, this novel is a real piece of work and a beautiful exercise in finding the fine line between beauty and ugliness.
Rating: 4/5
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