Royo County

by Robert Roper

Royo County, small, inbred, primitive, is that flat California farm country where no one who isn't running from something would go and which everyone between 16 and 40 wants to leave.

The people you meet in Royo County seem ordinary enough. But underneath the deceptively quiet surface runs a stream of savagery and passion. Like Buck and Eva who play at sex, never knowing when her husband Ed will return. And Ed, who has his own private game.

160 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some marvelous writing here. Robert Roper is great with the interaction of a man and a woman, and with creating claustrophobic dead-endedness in crappy rural California. On the negative side, you can see the stitching of a Stanford creative writing student assembling various stories into a first novel, and rural California is only crappy if you choose to see it that way. There’s a dark cloud of noir that seems somehow imposed onto characters who deserve better outcomes. As I’m reading I’m aware that the fates of characters who I care about -- whether they live or die -- depends on an author who has an attraction to violent gloomy evil. At the end I didn’t say, ‘Ah, of course’ -- it wasn’t a puzzle suddenly clicking together, just a heavy-handed thump.

But the writing, oh wow. I love passages like this one in which a sheriff (named Noodles) comes home to find a stranger in his trailer:

The woman shut off the burner and poured boiling water into a cup. “You want some tea?” she asked over her shoulder, holding the pot motionless over the sink; Noodles said nothing, so with a shrug of her shoulders she poured the extra water down the drain. She looked very much at ease there in the tiny kitchen, fixing her tea; her bare brown arms moved easily and quickly here and there, pulling sugar from the cabinet and milk from the box refrigerator and mixing them together with a slow circular motion of her wrist. Noodles was vaguely annoyed by her ease in his kitchen; he felt ignored, his threatening pose was going unseen. He shifted his position, bringing his feet close together and hooking his thumbs in his black leather belt. He cleared his throat loudly.

When she failed to turn around he said, “I’m going to ask you just one more time”; then he paused, a little too long, trying to remember the proper question; “I say, I’m going to ask you just one more time: what the hell are you doing in my trailer?”

She eased herself into the little breakfast nook by the stove, lit another cigarette and sipped her tea. “I’m here for you to fuck,” she said, “if you want it. Joe Candiano sent me down. I’m a present, from him to you.”

Noodles stared at her. He felt his stomach knot up painfully; it made a rumbling sound he was sure she heard at the other end of the room. “Well, shit,” he said; his mouth dropped wide open, then he glared at her, then he smiled. “Well I’ll be damned,” he said. He discovered that he was grinning broadly; he pulled his face in tight again and fixed it in a leer. His head waggled slightly; his eyelids drooped and he winked broadly several times. But the woman was looking elsewhere, out between the flowered curtains on the window, into her teacup, at her long well-manicured fingernails.

She looked at him finally, but without any particular expression. He looked very fat to her; he was like a wall of flesh across the far end of the trailer. His khaki shirt was stretched tight across his huge trunk; he had a fat man’s jiggling breasts and deposits of fat like ammo pouches on his hips. His face was really funny, she thought; it was remarkably wide and perfectly hairless, as round and smooth as a melon. He didn’t look particularly cruel to her. The cruel ones were usually smaller and more alert, with quick hands and lots of talk. The little ones really liked to hurt; the fat ones did but were unaware. She looked at Noodles, who was leering at her; she stifled first a laugh and then a yawn.

[Måns BT · Rating 4 out of 5]

Förvånansvärt cool och atmosfärisk bild av en dyster och sunkig liten stad där alla karaktärer är fläckade av sorg eller våld. En rätt så klyschig kärlekshistoria får liv av miljöns skräpigt underbara vision och resulterar i en respektabel debut. Gillade dock verkligen inte pedofil delen, kändes onödigt inskriven för att lägga till ytterligare transgression som bara blev för mycket. Det blir nästan pinsamt att slänga in våldtäkten av ett barn helt från ingenstans och sedan inte följa upp händelsen genom några konsekvenser, en larvig provokation. Annars rätt klockren, förutom ett gäng snedsteg i prosan.