Shug Akins is a lonely, overweight thirteen-year-old boy. His mother, Glenda, is the one person who loves him--she calls him Sweet Mister and attempts to boost his confidence and give him hope for his future. Shuggie's purported father, Red, is a brutal man with a short fuse who mocks and despises the boy. Into this small-town Ozarks mix comes Jimmy Vin Pearce, with his shiny green T-bird and his smart city clothes. When he and Glenda begin a torrid affair, a series of violent events is inevitably set in motion. The outcome will break your heart.
"This is Daniel Woodrell's third book set in the Ozarks and, like the other two, Give Us a Kiss and Tomato Red, it peels back the layers from lives already made bare by poverty and petty crime." --Otto Penzler, "Penzler Pick, 2001"
Release date:
April 24, 2012
Publisher:
Little, Brown and Company
Print pages:
208
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Winner of the Center for Fiction’s 2011Clifton Fadiman Medal, given annually to honora book by a living American author that deservesrenewed recognition and a wider readership.
“Close to flawless.… A powerful but slippery tale of passion, pain, retribution, and the end of childhood.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“This is Daniel Woodrell’s third book set in the Ozarks and, like the other two, Give Us a Kiss and Tomato Red, it peels back the layers from lives already made bare by poverty and petty crime.”
—Otto Penzler, “Penzler Pick,” 2001
“Woodrell’s Ozarks are cut as cleanly as Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia and pocked with characters just as volatile and proud and unpredictable.”
—Chicago Tribune
“For all its brevity, The Death of Sweet Mister carries an emotional weight that, once shouldered, cannot easily be put down.”
—Kansas City Star
“Compelling… Woodrell’s descriptions seem real and alive and linger long after reading.”
—Boston Globe
“With Daniel Woodrell’s new novel, he has written another classic. At once satiric and considerate, violent and humane, The Death of Sweet Mister turns the petty crimes and vices of his poor Ozark whites into a strangely poignant drama that’s as stunning and evocative as ancient Greek tragedy.”
—Ron Hansen, author of Atticus
“Fiery, poetic, hair-raising.… Shuggie’s voice rings so true and clean, and the prose is sharp and spikey.”
—Los Angeles Times
“The Death of Sweet Mister holds its own against anything in the canon of American literature. One does not often meet—one very rarely meets—a child narrator with the strength of voice and character and sheer humanity of this boy. My heart constantly ached for him—I wanted to take him on. But at the same time, Mr. Woodrell keeps the story, at each turn, fiercely opposed to sympathetic, pathetic longings that would reduce the narrative to anything less than a powerful and brave and true piece of American literature. This is a book I’d place alongside Faulkner’s The Reivers or Hemingway’s ‘Big Two-Hearted River.’ ”
—Kaye Gibbons, author of Ellen Foster
“Wonderful.… A real sweetheart of a book.”
—Lawrence Block
“The voice of Shuggie is inhabited by Woodrell so artfully that you begin to doubt that there is an author behind the curtain at all.… Daniel Woodrell is like a modern Mark Twain with tobacco juice splashed, unashamedly, on his white suit. He might also be the best American novelist at work today.”
—George Pelecanos, GQ
“A dark, disturbing beauty of a story.… Woodrell throws down sentences that will leave you amazed.”
—Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain
“The plot, tawdry in the abstract, is transformed by Woodrell’s gallows humor and his rendering of Shug’s voice, part Huck Finn, part Holden Caulfield.”
—Bharat Tandon, Times Literary Supplement
“Woodrell finds poetry in pathos, but he also turns coming-of-age into a bargain with the devil. A word-perfect conclusion to an unforgettable trilogy of novels.”
—Bill Ott, Booklist
“Woodrell has achieved near mastery of style: language, plot, characterization, and theme mesh with a seamless power.”
—Michael Anderson, New York Times Book Review
“Wonderful… noir at its darkest, and affecting, and utterly convincing.”
—Washington Post Book World
“You wake up in this here world, my sweet li’l mister, you got to wake up tough.”
Most of us remember parts of ourselves that didn’t survive adolescence. At some point, to make our way in the world, we did as the Good Book suggested and put aside childish things. And so it is in The Death of Sweet Mister, where the death in question is not physical. In some ways, though, it’s worse. It’s the death of the “sweet,” the death of the soul, the end of anything approximating childhood or innocence.
Sweet Mister’s real name is Morris “Shug” Akins. His father may or may not be Red Akins, a career criminal given to fits of cyclonic rage. His mother is the beautiful alcoholic Glenda, a woman far too sexy for rural Missouri, maybe far too sexy for the world at large, a woman who “could make ‘Hello, there’ sound so sinful you’d run off and wash your ears after hearing it, then probably come back to hear it again.”
Shug is not sexy. Shug is overweight and socially awkward among his peers. He is thirteen and filled with bottled-up screams from years of Red’s abuse. He’s so lonely that he breaks your heart on nearly every page. The novel is concerned with his coming-of-age one summer in the late ’60s in the Ozarks. Coming-of-age in the Ozarks was probably never an easy thing, but these aren’t just the Ozarks, they are Daniel Woodrell’s Ozarks, and that is pitiless terrain. Few writers have captured lives laid to waste by generational poverty with the precision of Woodrell. His body of work is already canonical in the sense that you can’t imagine American literature in the last twenty years without him. And until we hear otherwise, the Ozarks are his and his alone, as indelibly stamped by his spare and savage poetry as Faulkner’s Mississippi or William Kennedy’s Albany. In Woodrell’s world the violent are the rule, not the exception, and what they bear away from this world is kindness and empathy and the uncaged heart.
When the novel begins, Shug still possesses those things. He identifies with the victims and the vanquished. “A hurt-voiced dog was chained up lonely or locked out not too far away and did bay and bay, baying so’s I could understand, baying the way I felt.” Later, he will come upon robins “so lost in gorging on beached worms that they sat there feasting yet when I walked up, so I took the worms’ side and kicked at them…”
Red, however, knows nothing of empathy. He berates and belittles Shug without end. He uses and discards Glenda as he sees fit; if she complains, he beats her with “fists, which could flurry so swift.” He uses Shug too, enlisting him more and more as an accomplice on the pharmaceutical robberies he and his friend Basil get up to. These involve second-story work mostly, and it’s fitting that during the summer his life will change irrevocably, Shug discovers the height gives him a new vantage point where the “world looked the same as I always saw, only I could see more of it at a time.”
To see more of the world is a necessary step in anyone’s passage from innocence to experience, but what Shug gets to see involves bloodletting, cruelty, and a particularly toxic form of Oedipal bewilderment.
When Glenda takes up with a Thunderbird-driving, soft-hearted cook named Jimmy Vin, we can see the carnage coming from a mile off, but that hardly tempers our fascination. In all of his novels, but most particularly in this one and in Winter’s Bone, Woodrell is after so much more than the paltry “country noirist” label that’s been attached to him. He is writing high tragedy set among low people. His novels are about sensational things—murder, tribalism, incest, and the idiocy of regeneration through violence as a concept—but he never renders them sensationally. Instead, he writes with such poetic clarity his prose seems to have been scrubbed in a cold stream.
When all the dead have been buried (usually in unmarked graves) and all the scores have been settled (until the next cycle of revenge, anyway), and Shug’s “bottle where I hid my lifelong screams” has shattered, we have completed our journey through one of the literary masterworks of the last quarter century. I don’t know anyone who’s read this novel who didn’t feel seized and then altered by it. Because what dies in Sweet Mister is what we pray has not died in us, but what we fear, in our more honest hours, vanished years ago.
—Dennis Lehane
RED MADE me get out and paint the truck another color once we’d crossed the state line. His voice to me seemed always to have those worms in it that eat you once you’re dead and still. His voice always wanted to introduce me to them waiting worms. He had a variety of ugly tones to speak in and used them all at me on most days. He whipped off a skinny country rock road and dove the truck down a slope of plain young weeds towards a creek that slobbered and swung under some trees for shade and parked. Glenda, which was my mom, rolled between him and me in the cab, smelling of her “tea,” as she called her rum and colas, and last night’s sweat and this morning’s perfume, her head pretty often soft on my shoulder and her breaths going up my nose. The weather had looped around to where it was good again, too good to last long, and had prompted blossoms to unclench and wild flowers to pose tall and prissy amongst the weeds, plus it brought forth song birds and bumble bees and all the likewise shit of spring. The tree patch we’d swung under blocked the eyesight of any decent folks who might pass along on that rock road and gain a curiosity about us if we were available to be seen. Our ways often required us to not be seen. Red had pulled something fairly wrong in a white truck down in Arkansas and wished to be driving a blue one back in Missouri.
“So hop your fat ass out, boy, and start tapin’ those newspapers over the windows. I’ve showed you how before.”
“And I learned it when you showed it.”
“Well? So set your flab to wigglin’ and get out there and go at it, boy.”
Glenda listened to him with her eyes shut and her head on my shoulder. Her pale right hand, which was elegant and fast, snapped like a clothespin onto the pudge at my equator and pinched hard, pinched my flab extra hard, this pain reminding me silently to stand up tough to her husband.
She said, “Don’t belittle him so that way.”
He said, “Which way?”
“Shuggie’s not fat.”
“The hell he ain’t.”
Glenda sat upright and flubbed her lips, so gorgeous even with a sleepy face and hardly any makeup. She had hair the color they call raven, and it had been back-combed and puffed up and out and sprayed to a certain round firmness. This was her fancy dolled-up style of hair instead of her usual, which was just drooping loose. Glenda never would get too plain or too heavy. Her eyes were of that awful blue blueness that generally attaches to things seen at a distance, far away, far out yonder on the water, or way way up.
“Maybe,” she said, “portly, but not…”
“Aw, bull-shit!” Red shoved his door open and it squawked. “Your boy ain’t nothin’ but fat.” He slammed the door, then ducked his head in through the window. He looked at her and said, “What in hell are you smilin’ about?”
“If only to avoid wrinkle lines,” she said, “I have chosen to appear happy.” She pinched me again and winked my way. Red turned and went to the truck bed and started tossing out tape and paint and papers. “Is there any tea left in my thermos, Shug?”
“Yeah. I mixed it fresh in the parking lot back at that café.”
“Hand it here, baby. I hear a thirst stomping towards me, think I best meet it halfway.”
I did hand that tea to her, then I did get out and grab up the papers and the tape Red had tossed. I took the papers and spread them over the glass windshield and side windows, then used my teeth to pull the tape loose. The tape rolled out with a sound like sneezes.
Red stood paces from me near the biggest close bush and pissed piss-lashes at it while singing one of those old songs that once in a while showed up on the radio even that year, which was way after them tunes had got stale. The song was of the “Ready Teddy” or “Tutti Frutti” or “Good Golly, Miss Molly” type of olden rhyming rock’n roll. Olden rhyming tunes to which he was yet and forever dedicated, I’d say. I could not say what had got him to singing or why. This trip to Hot Springs was one of those so many many times when him and Glenda were supposed to patch things up between them and get on the level as married folks again, which they never did do.
I’d become thirteen that year and Red was near only the height I was at that age, but a man. He had the muscles of a man and all those prowling hungers and meannesses. You might have taken him to be a wrestler or a Viking or such from the muscles he carried. His hair was the color you’d expect, but a red of so odd a red that it gave a slight comic-book or circus angle to him. You could see skin shine between the hairs of his head, and the thin amount of hairs left were slicked into a bump, a thin bump of hair combed aloft slick like rockin’ greasers of the prior decade, to which he was loyal as to style.
He lashed that bush with four or five cups of coffee he’d drunk at breakfast and kept singing. The song was along the lines . . .
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