Jim Thompson’s The Getaway
Over the years, I’ve gotten to where I read less and less. That’s a problem for a storyteller. One of the problems for me is that I don’t like to read anything when I’m working on a story, and I tend to always be working on a story. I think I’ve managed to read 3 books in the last two years.
That needs to change, so I’ve joined Anthony Jeselnik’s new online book club as a way of spurring myself. Jeselnik promises to pick unique and short novels, which suits me just fine at this stage in my reading life.
His first pick is Jim Thompson’s The Getaway, which I finished over the weekend. My goodness. I’d heard of Thompson, the so-called “Dimestore Dostoyevski,” but The Getaway was my first sampling of his work.
First off, the storytelling—while sometimes straying into the ridiculous—is very compelling. This novel just hums along, a masterpiece and a lesson in creating pace. I tend to read and write far slower novels, like Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. The characters are engaging and developed as much as they need to be. It’s perhaps a good example of employing the Hedgehog concept in building a character, and whether a storyteller decides that they know one or two big things about their character, or whether they know a whole bunch of little things instead. Thompson for the most part is going the route of telling us one or two big things about his people, and that’s good enough for the plot and reader engagement.
I’m not a big reader of crime fiction, but I can see it’s appeal. There’s a breezy sleaziness throughout the book, which is far more violent and nasty than Faulkner’s Sanctuary, which was published a few decades earlier. That book led critics to call Faulkner the leader of a literary “cult of cruelty,” but Thompson is far more base (and admittedly fun) as the book builds up a very high body count, any number of casual, matter-of-fact woman beatings, and increasingly absurd situations and escapes.
Which bring us to the final 30 odd pages, where the novel starts to change into something quite different, something claustrophobic and foreboding as our two primary characters are forced to hideout in some extreme and disgusting scenarios before finally escaping to…
Hell? An existential nightmare? I’ll say no more about the final chapter, except that after I read it I immediately flipped back and read it again, carefully, to make sure I was interpreting everything correctly. It’s a fascinating decision to end the book this way. It’s such a marked tonal shift (and I love a marked tonal shift) into a Hotel California/Soylent Green/Jonestown kind of vibe, with Thompson’s narration now becoming a distant, encompassing voice that’s largely not engaging with the characters’ perspectives at all.
If anything, the narration in the final chapter reminds me a lot of how Ursula Le Guin narrates her classic story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In both examples, the reader is dropped into a strange existence with plenty of hints that Something’s Off and Things Are Not What They Seem; and then the reveal of the truth is given. Of course, in Le Guin’s story, it’s at least possible to turn your back and leave. That doesn’t appear to be at all an option in The Getaway, nor does it appear to cross the characters’ minds as far as I remember. Were I in their shoes, I might decide to try my luck in the wilderness once the money started running low. But maybe Thompson gave a logical answer to why this isn’t a consideration, and I’m just not remembering it. Or maybe the correct assumption is that there is no resulting to logic or action anymore: the characters are done with running, in both the physical and symbolic sense, and without the constant act of getting away there’s no longer any spirit to their lives. Their marriage and their sense of selfhood are both at terminal points, and even Doc’s cheery optimism has been leeched away.
It’s quite a turn for such a pulpy novel, and it absolutely elevates the story into something more provocative than, say, a Mickey Spillane novel. But as Mike Hammer once said, “Juno was a man!” And so am I—and a rather tired one after writing all of this. See you later.
