There is nothing easier in this world than reading something by Daniel Woodrell. His writing is like ice, your eyes just slip sharply over over the words. The Outlaw Album, a collection of short stories, is serious- innovative, beautiful, haunting- and can be categorized with volumes like Children of God, by Cormac McCarthy and A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor. His starkness and power is indeed similar to theirs, but Woodrell has built his own barrenness, his own hopelessness, his own courage.
The best story in this collection is UNCLE. From the opening “A cradle won’t hold my baby” to the crushing and chilling ending, I read as one transfixed. As with Ree, the protagonist of Winter’s Bone, the girl in this story is a powerful, driven female with whom a reader sympathizes. But we don’t understand her at all, we can’t. Her life is nothing like ours, and her strength and phsycality are beyond us as well. In a way, reading UNCLE is like reading a story about war, like Catch 22 or something, we can’t relate but we are hungry to try. Indeed, many of the stories contain characters who are veterans, or prone to violence and threats.
Even if the world The Outlaw Album plunges us into seems exotic or foreign despite being set in the US Ozarks, Woodrell’s characters are reminders of a human universal. They remain grounded while things go to shit around them, while their lives are sundered. Woodrell reminds us that a life can go to shit anywhere.
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