The Graduate by Charles Webb; South of Heaven by Jim Thompson; Nothing More than Murder by Jim Thompson – vel veeter Book Review

The Graduate – 4/5 Stars

Benjamin Braddock is home from college, en route to grad school in the fall, and experiencing an excruciating cocktail celebration at his parents home. He just can’t seem to tell them that he doesn’t want any of the things he worked for, has no plan for what to do or what this means, and also doesn’t know that he’s about to throw himself into a nice little destructive spiral. He see Mrs Robinson at the party, still pretty attractive for her disturbing old age of like 43, and agrees to drive her home, where she offers to have an affair with him. He panics, her husband comes home, and Ben runs away to go “on the road” for a few weeks, where things don’t go great. When he returns, he begins the affair in earnest, and he continues to spiral through the summer. At the end, he breaks off the affair, tries to get himself together, and apparently falls in love with Mrs Robinson’s daughter. You have to decide how serious any or all of the feelings here are.

I think plenty of people hate this book, and I get it, I think. I feel that enjoying this book depends almost entirely on just how sympathetic you think the book is for its languishing protagonist. If you think the book is very sympathetic, then you probably wouldn’t like the book. If instead, you think the book is being both critical and ironic in its affection for its protagonist, then the book is a lot more enjoyable. I happen to think that Charles Webb has some shame and embarrassment for Benjamin Braddock. It’s not as cutting as Edward St Aubyn or Philip Roth, but I also don’t think it’s as self-serious as some of the other reviewers have made it out to be. He’s a hapless fool with no direction, no real guidance through his feelings or goals, and untreated depression at a time when only “crazy” people went to psychiatrists. He’s wrong for the world and trying desperately (and I think hilariously) to fix it.

(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71047.The_Graduate)

South of Heaven – 4/5 Stars

I hope you like discussions about dynamite, which according to this novel, is definitely a lady. Because this novel has lots of them. At first, for about the first half of this novel, I didn’t know if it was going to become a crime novel or not. That’s strange for a Jim Thompson book because in some, there’s crime in the first page. Here though we begin with our narrator, a twenty-one year old with a long, but mostly petty criminal record signing up to work on an oil pipeline. He’s signing on with his friend, and both will be working with the blasting. That job is among the more dangerous on the line, but it also comes with some perks and some allowances that the digging jobs don’t. Early on, our narrator meets a young woman (as happens in these books), falls madly in love with her (more so is 21 and she’s apparently crazy hot), and will do anything for her. He picks a few fights, makes a few friends, a few enemies, and then one morning, after mouthing off to the boss, he’s arrested for murder. He has to figure out what’s happened, how his future will be shaped, and what hidden histories these other people in his life contain. It’s a solid crime novel through and through and has a real verisimilitude about the writing.

Nothing More than Murder – 3/5 Stars

An early Jim Thompson (from the 40s, when I generally associate him with the 1950s and 1960s), where a small town movie theater rivalry (or rather the exclusive rights of movie theater operation) turns deadly (if only in small ways like the title suggests).

This feels almost like a proto-crime novel for Thompson, whose other novel range in quality from the just ok to the very very good. This is just ok, and I think part of it is my own fault. I think film distribution rights, and movie theaters in the 1940s and 1950s are really interesting, and that kind of comes through here a little, but there’s a lot less of a feeling of Thompson using that interest to weave and work through the plot the way he does in other novels. It’s instead almost arbitrary that these figures work in this field at all. The novel is still perfectly readable, but feels less well formed as a consequence.