After sorting the two copies of Jerry’s novel by page number, I set off to divvy it into chapters. My plan was to read it a chapter at a time.
Of course, I immediately discovered entire chapters are missing. I hope that they were useless exposition that he threw out in disgust. He seems to edit himself somewhat: in a script he wrote for a city promotion piece, after he wrote the part that covers the city’s beginnings he boldly scrawled “FUCK THE PAST” and then scratched out that page.
Sorting the chapters required that I look at the top of every page, and somehow that meant I read more than when I was looking for every page number at the bottom. Some things became clear:
- Someone, a child I believe, is threatened.
- In the final chapter, someone (perhaps a woman) is murdered.
- A few pages later there is a trial, and then it abruptly ends. The pacing of the plot might have issues.
- There’s a lot of dialect (like, a Huckleberry Finn level of dialect) in the dialog between the oil roughnecks. It isn’t bad. Colorful.
- What he’s bad at? Names. Men are named “Tex” and “Pardner” and I swear, there is one man known only by his last name, which is “Lawless.” Perhaps he meant to add some subtlety in the next draft.
I didn’t want spoilers, so I tried to see as little of the novel as possible. Unfortunately, I couldn’t avoid smelling it. Who could guess a man could smoke so much that his novel would still stink of cigarettes decades later?
One response to “A Novel to Wrinkle Your Nose”
Missing chapters – you will never know whether they were needless exposition and deliberately cut, places he intended to fill plot points in later when he got around to it, or written so brilliantly he saved them somewhere else (… probably not).
And paper absorbs smells amazingly. The “environmental air sponge” (I have no idea what is in it, but it’s pretty weird) or storing the whole novel in baking soda might help. Or might not, as cigarette is also one of the more persistent odors out there.