The Death of Sweet Mister

You wake up in this here world, my sweet li'l mister, you got to wake up tough. You go out that front door tough of a mornin' and you stay tough 'til lights out—have you learned that?

You wake up in this here world, my sweet li’l mister, you got to wake up tough. You go out that front door tough of a mornin’ and you stay tough ’til lights out—have you learned that?

Coming-of-age in the Ozarks was probably never an easy thing, but these aren’t just the Ozarks, they are Daniel Woodrell’s Ozarks, and that is pitiless terrain. Few writers have captured lives laid to waste by generational poverty with the precision of Woodrell. His body of work is already canonical in the sense that you can’t imagine American literature in the last twenty years without him. And until we hear otherwise, the Ozarks are his and his alone, as indelibly stamped by his spare and savage poetry as Faulkner’s Mississippi or William Kennedy’s Albany. In Woodrell’s world the violent are the rule, not the exception, and what they bear away from this world is kindness and empathy and the uncaged heart.

She had a way of shuffling generally real loose at the pivot points that made you look when she went by, wherever it was that she went by you: store, alley, roadhouse, country lane. Granny said Mom could make “Hello, there” sound so sinful you’d run off and wash your ears after hearing it, then probably come back to hear it again.

An airplane, the passenger kind, passed overhead, a silver dot high in the blue, and made that sad sound in the sky, that sort of sad hum from a thing far away and going farther that makes your chest leak air and feel hollow.

Basil, I’ve got to say, that is really somethin’ about you quittin’ dope.” “It is, ain’t it? It is really somethin’. Course, not havin’ any on hand is a big, big help.