Barry Gifford

The quality is regressing a bit faster than I would like, at this point, with this 6th tale of Sailor and Lulu.

There are occasional clever lines (which, all highlights and annotations will be displayed when I finish the whole collection), but a shocking amount of this story is recapping previous events, both in Gifford's own work, and in several ostensibly unrelated movies, and then offering interpretations of same.

But the shocking stuff isn't really shocking anymore, and while one can be temporarily amused by a characer calling attention to Gifford's own overreliance on car crashes and kidnappings, acknowledging one's crutches is not the same as subverting them.… (more)

Road-trip mytho-poeticism rendered almost entirely in dialogue, but without all that much criminal activity (and nowhere near the same feeling of sinister stakes the Lynch film brings out). This is not surprising, considering Barry Gifford started out on the poetry side of things, but this does read like a first novel, even if it apparently isn’t. There are a lot of thoughts and low-key philosophy thrown in that walks the line between profundity and dirt-bag wisdom.

It works well as a supplement to the David Lynch film in that the things I enjoy in each are completely different, though it took me a while to mentally age down Sailor and Lulu from their Cage/Dern incarnations. Probably the thing I most enjoy is that the only main character Gifford doesn’t try to inhabit is the obvious (potential) authorial stand-in, Sailor. Gifford is much more interested in Lulu, her mother, and Johnny Farragut, and that gives things a nearly feminist cast, which, one year before Thelma and Louise makes this amongst the first road-trip narratives primarily concerned with the female experience of it, albeit one written by a man.
… (more)