False Grit: A Trip Through ‘Galveston’

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Genre fiction, whether it is mystery, horror, sci-fi, or fantasy, has often received the cold shoulder from the supercilious literary establishment. These imperious critics, novelists and journalists, casually dismiss the vast majority of genre as ‘silly,’ ‘derivative,’ or, worst of all, ‘not serious.’ In 2003, when Stephen King was awarded the National Book Award, literary critic Harold Bloom decried King’s win, calling it, ‘another low in the process of dumbing down our cultural life.’ I would call Bloom’s reaction a bit overdone. Similar to my thoughts regarding young adult fiction, genre writing is capable of tremendous beauty and insight. To dismiss it is to dismiss works by writers such as Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy B. Hughes, Shirley Jackson, and even classical greats like Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, Bram Stoker, and Wilkie Collins. If anything, genre fiction’s frequent willingness to delve in to the dark and outré, to search for thrills and chills, often without the worry of ‘sophistication’ or ‘good taste,’ give it a piquancy that can be both gripping and thought-provoking. Fawning over David Mitchell’s new novel maybe the pinnacle of cocktail party conversation, but there is nothing wrong with enjoying something like Gone Girl, a clever and darkly humorous page-turner.

One of the most frequently overlooked subsections of genre writing is roman noir; a close relative to the hardboiled detective/crime fiction from the 1930s and 40s. Unsurprisingly, it received little serious critical love in its time, and in the years since, while it is has found begrudging respect in more literary circles, it is still treated more as diversion; entertainment, but not ‘serious writing.’ One is more likely to find Madame Bovary on a list of great literary (anti)heroines than Mildred Pierce.

Can roman noir be ‘serious?’ I would say so, although blending the inherent ‘lowbrow’ nature of the genre with the supposed ‘highbrow’ aspect of ‘serious’ (the dreaded s word) literary fiction is a tricky business. The balancing of the two can lead to the failure, either of pretentiousness or condescension. Galveston, the debut novel of True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto, manages to fall neatly into both camps.

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To those unfamiliar with Pizzolatto, he has had quite the year. There is probably no TV drama of 2014 that inspired quite as fierce and divided response as True Detective. Many critics and viewers lauded it as a groundbreaking addition to HBO’s slate; a stew of Southern Gothic creepiness, Lovecraftian horror, and pulpy noir, anchored with two excellent performances from Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. Conversely, many other critics and viewers saw the series was all icing and no cake; a collection of interesting visual flourishes undone by hackneyed, overwrought narrative nonsense. I was one of those severely underwhelmed by the series. Great performances and stark moments of beauty and tension, including the much-discussed shootout/tracking shot, all lost in an ocean of indulgent, pseudo-philosophical monologues (‘Time is a flat circle’; well, duh, if it isn’t, it’s a cylinder) and a litany of every cliché in the Dark Male Antihero™ genre of ‘prestige television.’ However, I heard Pizzolatto had written a novel, Galveston, a few years prior to creating True Detective. Maybe his strength was in prose fiction instead of screenwriting? His novel had been nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author, it received a glowing NY Times review from fellow novelists Dennis Lehane and is in development for a film adaptation starring one of my favorite actors, Matthias Schoenaerts.

Unlike the collaborative nature of television or film, a novel’s success or failure rests solely at the feat of its writer. Pizzolatto proves himself even less adept at prose fiction than he is at writing for the small screen. Galveston, a devastatingly arid slice of roman noir, wants to be both sophisticated, existentialist literature and a black-hearted piece of pulp: a Sailor and Lula novel by way of Camus’s The Stranger. To say it succeeds on neither level is merely stating the obvious. However, the novel is so stubbornly banal, a disastrous mishmash of contrived sordidness and empty-headed pseudo-philosophy, it almost comes full circle into being a triumph. Nothing about it works, save for the fact that it is a quick read for anyone who has passed grade school.

Galveston, set in 1987, is the tale of Roy Cady, a grizzled bouncer and part-time hit man, who is recently diagnosed with lung cancer. After a failed assassination attempt, set up by his manipulative bitch-goddess ex-girlfriend (a full time occupation in Pizzolatto’s limited, sclerotic imagination), he hits the road from Louisiana to Galveston, Texas. Along for the ride is Rocky, a moony-eyed teen hooker (is there any other kind?), whom Roy had rescued during the botched assassination. She insists on picking up her baby sister. That’s pretty much it. Oh sure, other things happen, but in the interest of preserving ‘plot’ developments, I’ll leave it at that. And really, there’s not much more: some quasi-existential pondering about the yearning for the past and the impending sense of death and destruction, uninteresting little character details (Roy carves little men out of discarded beer cans, a flourish that would be repeated in True Detective), and far too many metaphors. There are times where Galveston reads less a novel and more like a MFA student’s creative writing exercise, with less self-awareness.

In one passage, Roy describes his ex:

‘She reminded me of the empty glass of a swallowed cocktail, and at the heart of the empty glass was a smashed lime rind on ice.’

Hmmmm. I could swear I have read something similar:

To say Pizzolatto’s prose is James M. Cain by way of Bret Easton Ellis is reiterating the obvious. Nevertheless, there is something profoundly depressing that in the often unfairly overlooked or maligned roman noir genre, Galveston manages to attract attention and acclaim. It’s bad literary fiction, it’s bad commercial fiction, and ultimately it’s remarkable only in its aggressive tepidness.

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Pizzolatto opens his novel with a William Faulkner quote: ‘How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.’ No doubt he intends this to set an appropriately lugubrious atmosphere of wistfulness and despair. Instead, it reads as a desperate attempt at coolness and profundity; one cannot shake the nagging feeling that deep down, Pizzolatto knows his novel is a pile of slop.

The Spanish philosopher, Beatriz Preciado, once said: ‘The problem resides precisely in the fact that no one will come to save us and that we are still some distance from our inevitable disappearance. It will thus be necessary to think about doing something while we are on the way out.’

I applaud Pizzolatto for finding a way to occupy his time. I only wish he hadn’t felt compelled to share it via publication.