W.D. Clarke’s Reviews > The Driftless Trilogy > Status Update

That's the first of the three novels, then. Excellent. Review to come over there, in that place in the matrix of GR-space that The Driftless Zone lives, on its own. Deservedly.

Riffing on Robert Mitchum in Out of the past (1947):

He's Noir Man, he walks the line between the only two ways out I know of – complete acceptance (the hedonist), &complete rejection (the monk). Noir Man takes the sublime out of cynicism, brings cynicism down to Earth where it belongs; and he accepts one thing, a case, a woman –he doesn't accept everything. He rejects almost everything –he's not a fool...

And if these may be taken as the fallow ravings of a once misfertile mind I ask only to becalled as foolish as the first hominid to conceive an unintelligible intelligence beyond – that it be understood that occasionally a man needs an idea like he once needed the gods...

Gonna be my epitaph, that—Horseman, pass by!

After a lovely, page-long Rabelaisian list of the kinds of people who get run out of town, I encounter this gleaming little gem of a conceit:

Cops and cab drivers are fraternal twins of the night, separated at birth, torn apart by sardonic fate. Mongrelized already by paternity, they've been raised by wolves and jackals in packs that have a bard enough time recognizing...

Wow, in Ch 3 the authorial "I" unexpectedly intrudes to introduce his geographical demographer friend's elaborate theory about peeps who people small-city America...one of the best tours de force of recent memory (and I had no idea re: the geological Driftless Zone, i.e SW Wisconisin

And here again I wonder what it was about our land that made the glaciers decide to avoid it. What does it men that...

I was already digging this, even moreso when I found out what kinda car the protag drove...

https://youtu.be/NUR_TxUjXR4?t=16

...been humming the tune in my head all day tho