Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An Angry Country

It’s difficult to imagine what encouraged the first English settlers to re-locate from their lives of drudgery in the Appalachian mountains to precisely the same lives of drudgery a thousand miles distant in the Ozark hills (mountains being a mere conceit). But move they did, with their traditions of inbreeding, moonshine and frontier violence.

The Ozarks, strectching over the corners of four US States, is a sort of American Kurdistan, an artificially divided country. The tourist brochures now describe the Ozarks as quaint. But this is a description that is apt neither for the gauche theme parks that celebrate an idyllic but fictional pioneer past, nor for the meth labs that have sprung up to replace the corn whiskey stills. In Winter’s Bone this is a lost country, pointing simultaneously to the origins of the real America and a not unlikely future.

Woodrell describes a world of neo-liberal, personal independence - every man for himself and God help the sap who asks for help - a real Jeffersonian agricultural democracy. The only significance of family relationship is that one isn’t shot on sight. This is a world of hyper-misogyny, permanently incipient violence, and drugs - lots of drugs as the primary cottage industry. Made in America has taken on a new significance. The pioneer spirit is alive and well: everyone else is a threat to personal independence; the greatest threat is law which is a blatant attempt to constrain individual freedoms.

Male bonding is proportionate to the frequency of joint illegal ventures. Contract, in the form of adherence to the ‘code,’ is King; penalties for non-performance are steep. Women, of course, only have the freedom to obey; they exist is a parallel universe of silent fear, maintaining what little social cohesion there is. Men don’t speak to them at all except to command; they have no capacity to make contracts, so they cajole and manipulate on the periphery.

Except for the iPods and the occasional paved road, things haven’t changed much in Woodrell’s Ozarkian culture over the last two hundred years. Same families, same feuds, same primitive responses to events - usually violent. The dialogue captures the mood as well as the mores:
“You ain’t here for trouble, are you? ’Cause one of my nephews is Buster Leroy, and didn’t he shoot your daddy one time?”
“Yes’m, but that ain’t got nothin’ to do with me. They settled all that theirselves, I think.”
“Shootin’ him likely settled it. What is it you want?”

The central social principle is staying off the grid in order to be left alone. No one has a right to interrupt a man’s nap, or his cooking of ‘crank’. If there’s no paper trail, you don’t exist. And if you don’t exist, it’s really difficult to find you much less prosecute you. So the details of births are undocumented; and there are only a few male names - prefaced by unique nicknames known only in the community - Thump Milton, Cotton Milton, Whoop Milton, and Blond Milton, all of the family Dolly, to name only a few. It’s easier to lose oneself that way. Identity after all is a sacred concept, so must be protected against intrusion and pollution by foreigners.

Cultural isolation has generated a unique mystical tradition of origin, that there existed a pure culture that has been lost in mysterious circumstances. The original settlers from Appalachia - the founding fathers - have been transformed into prophetic messengers proclaiming a new religion. The core of this religion is anger towards a hostile world. The reasons for the anger have been forgotten, except in the myths of origin, as a lack of faithfulness to tradition. The only real evidence of the past is the rubble left by previous generations, building stones strewn about ruined hillsides.

Anger in this culture has become virtually a genetic trait, passed down as a legacy. Without it, the natives have nothing in common, nothing to strive for. The anger is ultimately directed not at others but toward themselves, however. “You got to be ready to die every day—then you got a chance.” They hate themselves. Perhaps that’s why the migrated in the first place. The purpose of the drugs is not economic; their function is self-forgetting. The rest of the world is relevant only because it threatens the expression of their self-directed rage.

A symbolic microcosm of America in the age of Trump?

Postscript 26Nov18: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...

Postscript 29Nov18: a little Ozark nostalgia: https://www.newsweek.com/video-confed...

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