#8 Winter's Bone, by Daniel Woodrell

I was about two-thirds of the way through Winter’s Bone when I realized it wasn’t the book I was expecting it to be. So when I finished, I decided I had better read it again right away (it’s less than 200 pages). I had it on my radar in the first place because it was made into a movie that got a 2010 best picture nomination (with the implicit stipulation that it wasn’t going to win). The movie was featured on a couple of the NPR programs that I listen to, including Fresh Air and Studio 360. I heard how this fine, fine movie was based on a fine, fine book, so I thought I might try both. Haven’t found the movie yet at a reasonable price—it might be time to sign up for Netflix again.

So I’m blaming NPR for my faulty expectations. Yes, there was the feisty 16-year-old heroine, as promised. But the other angle I kept hearing about was the unflinching depiction of the harrowing socioeconomic conditions in the Ozark backcountry of southern Missouri. I was expecting an expose, social realism, a story about the devastation wrought by lack of opportunity and methamphetamine. A book that would bring important matters to my attention that I had no right to ignore, etc.

It’s not that you couldn’t read the book that way, I just don’t think that’s the book that Daniel Woodrell was writing. The poverty and the meth are the setting, but they are not the story. Woodrell’s wikipedia article starts this way: “Woodrell coined the phrase ‘country noir’ to describe his 1996 novel Give Us a Kiss. Reviewers have frequently since used the term to categorize his writing.” Winter’s Bone actually does have a lot more in common with The Big Sleep than it does with, say, The Grapes of Wrath. (I have not actually read either, but I have seen the movies.)

The plot is this: Ree Dolly’s father Jessup has disappeared, leaving her in charge of her eight- and ten-year-old brothers and her mentally broken-down mother. They are poor, and it’s the middle of a cold, snowy winter. An officer comes to their house one day and informs them Jessup has a court appearance the following week and that if he fails to show, the house and property will be confiscated to pay his bond. Ree assures the policeman that she will find her father, since if there is no house then there can be no family.

The real story begins to be told as Ree begins her search for “Dad.” This story could be called “The Dolly clan and how they got to be the way they are.” The hills are alive with Dollys—they seem to constitute the majority of the population in the area. Dolly men are almost all given one of four first names: Milton, Jessup, Arthur or Haslam.

To have but a few male names in use was a holdover from the olden knacker ways…. Let any sheriff or similar nabob try to keep accounts on the Dolly men when so many were named Milton, Haslam, Arthur or Jessup. The Arthurs and the Jessups were the fewest, no more than five apiece, and the Haslams amounted to double the Arthurs or Jessups. But the great name of the Dollys was Milton, and at least two dozen Miltons moved about in Ree’s world. If you named a son Milton it was a decision that attempted to chart the life he’d live before he even stepped into it, for among Dollys the name carried expectations and history.

What is the exact nature of those expectations? We can easily infer that it is a kind of outlaw life. We also know that Ree and her mother lobbied hard to prevent either of her brothers from being named Milton. (It is perhaps a bit of a stretch to imagine Ree being quite so aware of such larger implications when her brothers were born—she would have been six and eight.)

When you have twenty men within a few square miles named Milton Dolly you have to come up with a system for telling them apart. When Ree is waiting patiently to see one of the many Miltons one day, she passes the time thusly:

To occupy her mind, she decided to name all the Miltons: Thump, Blond, Catfish, Spider, Whoop, Rooster, Scrap . . . . Lefty, Dog, Punch, Pinkeye, Momsy . . . . Cotton, Hog-jaw, Ten Penny, Peashot . . . . enough. Enough Miltons.

Then there is Ree’s uncle Teardrop (ne Haslam), Jessup’s brother. He has three teardrops tattooed on his cheek, one for each man he has killed in prison. Has also has had half his face melted away in a meth lab accident: “There wasn’t enough ear nub remaining to hang sunglasses on.”

Ree understands that she must put her case to one Dolly man after another until she finds the one who can tell her how to find Jessup. Woodrell does not explain the protocols that dictate Ree’s course of action, but despite the lack of nice manners these folk are as formal and precise as Japanese diplomats. In Winter’s Bone, on three separate occasions, Ree approaches the home of a Dolly man, submits her request to a woman who meets her before she enters, and, if necessary, identifies the nature of her kinship to the lord of the manor. Sometimes that’s enough to get her an audience, sometimes not.

She works her way up some sort of ladder of importance, starting with Uncle Teardrop, then going to a cousin named Little Arthur. These men treat her with a hint of avuncular solicitation, but they also threaten to knock her around for not following their advice, which is to abandon her effort to find Jessup. Both keep firearms at hand; both offer a hit of “crank,” which she declines.

The third and final Dolly man that Ree petitions is Thump Milton, who is clearly the top Milton. The exact nature of his authority is never stated, but Ree’s attempts to get in to see him remind me of the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy and her allies first attempt to see the wizard. Except that Thump is no humbug—his power is as absolute as it is mysterious. He is almost like a god—Ree never actually gets a clear look at Thump, as though looking at him were taboo, at least to a young unmarried woman who has no official business with him.

The Dollys, in the end, seem to resemble a biblical tribe more than an Appalachian clan. They may live in a place called Missouri and drive pickup trucks, but they respect no law and known no history but their own. It isn’t that the Dollys have decided to separate themselves from the United States, it’s more that they share a time and a place with us without really being in the same universe. As I read Winter’s Bone, I was struck by the almost complete lack of references to politics, media, name brands, or proper nouns of any kind. When cultural references do occur, they are as if seen through smoked glass:

She parted her lips and snapped her teeth in step with that happy silly old song they sang in grade school about the submarine that was yellow and had everybody living in it.

For a few pages about midway through the book Woodrell provides a glimpse of the Dolly back story. It happens as Ree passes the stone ruins of an early Dolly settlement:

The walls of the old places had been pulled apart, the stones tossed asunder and tossed furiously about the meadow during the bitter reckoning of long ago.

Later she repasses them and recalls what she knows about what happened in the distant past:

She knew few details of the old bitter reckoning that erupted inside those once holy walls, but suddenly understood to her marrow how such angers between blood could come about and last forever. Like most fights that never finished it had to’ve started with a lie. A big man and a lie.

The big man and prophet who’d found messages from the Fist of Gods written on the entrails of a sparkling golden fish lured with prayer from a black river way east near the sea was Haslam, Fruit of Belief. The sparkling fish had revealed signs unto him and him alone, and he’d followed the map etched tiny on the golden guts and led them all across thousands of testing miles until he hailed these lonely rugged hollows of tired rocky soil as a perfect garden spot, paradise as ordained by the map of guts sent to his eyes from the Fist of Gods.

No allusions to Christianity—the Dolly cult is a from-scratch religion, with Haslam as its Abraham or Muhammad. In fact, the name Haslam has a middle-eastern sound to it, though google tells me that the current governor of Tennessee is named Bill Haslam. Scramble the letters around and you almost get salaam or lamas. It’s a very suggestive name.

There are a few more paragraphs of Ree ruminating on the Dolly creation story as she holes up in a cave to wait out a storm. But once she gets back on task we hear little more about Dolly deep time, except for the occasional reference to “Fist of Gods” or “Fruit of Belief.” But we now realize, as Ree pursues her quest to its harrowing conclusion, that these people aren’t merely ignorant depraved hillbillies, they are a failed nation, a seed that fell on stony soil, and did not flourish. The events that transpire are more than just one young woman’s quest to save her house and family, they are a glimpse into a world that has collapsed, but that has resisted, for better or worse, dissolving into the wider American culture.

Are there really such pockets of archaic culture in America? We have more successful cults, like the Mormons, and we have groups like the Scientologists and the People’s Temple, but I’m not aware we have any such mouldering tribe of Israel as the Dollys in our midst. Maybe Daniel Woodrell knows otherwise.

My second pass through Winter’s Bone was quite a bit more interesting than my first. Woodrell requires the reader to think and work, and that’s why I mentioned The Big Sleep earlier. Ree isn’t really sleuthing, but the reader must take pains to notice and consider the numerous anomalies and stray details that keep cropping. What of Aunt Bernadette that got swept off a bridge in a flood? What exactly happens between Ree and her friend Gail? When I was paging through the book looking for the Yellow Submarine reference mentioned above, I discovered that the word yellow appears on almost every other page in Winter’s Bone. What’s up with that? I have no idea. Maybe I need to read the book again.