Country: USA
Genre: Somewhere between memoir and bar tale.
Pages: 185
This is weird. This is the second tome of Jim Thompson's memoirs, written not even halfway into his long career as a crime writer. So it's hard to get perspective on this. It's even harder when it's your first Jim Thompson book. Yet, it is what it promises on the jacket. Roughneck is a series of stories about the author's life, told in semi-independent chapters, a bit like if the local drunk at the bar was telling you those crazy stories about all the jobs he had. I have to say the title is very well chose, because Thompson did so many crazy jobs and juggled with so much employment insecurity that it's nothing short of a miracle if he kept the drive to write all those novels. Roughneck is a testament to hard work and dedication. If you really want something, work hard at it, to the expense of your own health sometimes and it will happen. Not all the stories are interesting, but they weirdly function together and create a short and dynamic tale about an alcoholic drifter who really likes to write stories.
Nothing was ever easy to Jim Thompson. He started purveying for his mother and his sister as a teenager and had to work with strange and interesting characters as a result. The most entertaining and mind-blowing fact about his streak of shit job was that it always involved a shitload of alcohol. One of the first stories involves a job he had in a funeral home, where he didn't have all that much to do at all. But a paramedic he used to work with loved to terrorize him, inviting him to sleep in coffins with the dead, saying how comfortable they were. They also got drunk a lot and eventually got fired because of that. My favorite story concerned a drunken accountant named Carl, who had a very bad lisp. He still did his jobs better than everybody else, despite sinking deeper and deeper into alcoholism. He a tragic and funny character at the same time. All he does is to get drunker and drunker.
Roughneck has no plot per se. It vaguely follows Thompson's drifting across the USA, going from an odd job to another. Although, it's a great character study for crime writers. I have yet to read a Jim Thompson novel (that will soon be remedied), but I can understand why he decided to write crime and not rip off Hemingway or Hawthorne like many young authors of his time. Growing up in an economically tense era, he met all kind of low life thugs who dreamed of a better fate for themselves. His friend Allie Ivers (who as I can understand is also a part of Bad Boy, the first tome of his memoirs) kept popping in the stories at random moment, like a Djinn, mirroring an illusory future. It's like he follows Thompson around the many cities he travels in and keeps bothering him with empty promises and his distorted vision of success. I cannot decide yet if this character is an invention or not, but he's fascinating.
Well, it was a bad place to start reading Jim Thompson, no doubt. It's not a bad book, but part of what makes it work is that it's very short. Not all the stories have interest. Some are cathartic and you can feel the need Thompson has to just put them on paper. He makes it work as a whole, but I couldn't recommend anybody to start with Roughneck or even Bad Boy. It was written when he was still young and there's not much insight about the bulk of his career...because it didn't even happen yet. The Getaway, Pop. 1280, After Dark, My Sweet, The Grifters, all of that was to follow. The two lasting novels he had written back then were The Killer Inside Me and Savage Night. If you have read many of Thompson's book already, you might find Roughneck enlightening, but if you're a Thompson neophyte like me, you might want to start elsewhere. This is more like a cloudy diary than a straight up memoir. It has it's moments of brilliance, but the majority of Roughneck is just about drifting and trying to find work. An OK experience overall, but it leaves me eager to read an actual novel by Thompson.