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Seller's Description:
Used book in good and clean conditions. Pages and cover are intact. Limited notes marks and highlighting may be present. May show signs of normal shelf wear and bends on edges. Item may be missing CDs or access codes. May include library marks. Fast Shipping.
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Seller's Description:
Olson, Victor. 144 p. 1st edition, paperback original from Gold Medal (#348), 1953. VERY GOOD with small stab wound to front cover near top right corner, affecting 120 pages! No text affect, however. Still a solid copy. Victor Olson cover art.
David Goodis ( 1917 -- 1967) lived and worked in Hollywood before returning to his hometown of Philadelphia in 1950. When he returned, he lived in a room in his parents' home and published pulp novels as inexpensive paperback originals. Among these novels is "The Moon in the Gutter" written in 1953 and set in a poor decaying section of Philadelphia. The book is included in a collection of five Goodis novels recently published by the Library of America. David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s (Library of America) Each of the five books deserves individual attention. In 1983, Goodis' novel was loosely adapted for a French film, directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix and shown at the Cannes Film Festival. The film changes the setting from Philadelphia to Marseille.
Goodis wrote in a genre which tends to become formulaic, but each of his novels that I have read has its own character. This evocatively titled novel is about lonely and lost people-- categories which, the book suggests, are found widely across social classes. The book reminded me of the Victorian novelist George Gissing, particularly of his early books "The Nether World". Gissing wrote of the London poor and of their relationship to the more economically fortunate classes. Goodis explores similar themes in "The Moon in the Gutter" with a pessimistic sensitivity similar to Gissing's Among other writers with related tone and themes, I thought of Charles Bukowski and of Jack Kerouac.
The main character of the book is William Kerrigan,35, who lives unmarried in a squalid home on Vernon street with relatives. Kerrigan works as a stevedore in the tough world of the Philadelphia wharfs and is the only memb er of his household with a steady job. Seven months before the book begins, Kerrigan's beloved sister, Catherine, had killed herself in an alley due to depression resulting from rape. Kerrigan wants to find the perpetrator. Plot is less important in this book than character, place, and mood.
The settings of the book include the alley and the streets of the neighborhood, Kerrigan's home, the wharf where he works, and a shabby neighboorhood bar called Dugan's Den. A character from a wealthier portion of the city, Channing, is a patron and a slummer at Dugan's Den. Early in the novel when he meets Kerrigan, Channing describes himself in terms that essentially apply to the other figures in the book. "Im lonesome all the time.... I've been everywhere. I've done everything, and I've known everybody. And what it amounts to, I'm lonesome."
As he leaves Dugan's Den, Kerrigan reflects that "he was riding though life on a fourth-class ticket" before offering one of the many passages of description of the neighborhood in the book:
"He stared at the splintered front doors and unwashed windows and the endless obscene phrases inscribed with chalk on the tenement walls. For a moment he stopped and looked at the ageless two-word phrase, printed in yellow chalk by some nameless expert who put it there in precise Gothic lettering. It was Vernon Street's favorite message to the world. And now, in Gothic print, its harsh and ugly meaning was tempered with a strange solemnity."
As the book progresses, their are violent scenes on the docks, in the streets, and in the homes. Besides Kerrigan's search for the man who ruined his sister, the plot turns on Kerrigan's relationship with Loretta Channing, the sister of the man that slums in Dugan's Den. Loneliness and isolation have no class boundaries in this novel. The tone of the book is of loss and poignant sadness.
"The Moon in the Gutter" offers a bleak yet lyrical vision of poverty and of what Goodis sees as the loneliness of the human condition. It is a work of literature that gets beyond the categories of pulp or noir.
Robin Friedman
gstacy
Sep 13, 2007
they can't write 'em like they used to
i want david goodis to be my own little secret treasure, to have and to hold, and to covet knowingly when i read him on the train. but then i want everyone to give him the recognition and success that he deserved and did not get before he left us. " you kids today, and your muuusic..."
