We Need to Talk about Jim

Every family has one: the cousin in the corner at the reunion that no one wants to talk about, let alone talk to.  The one who has a reputation for being more than just a little whacked.  Maybe he’s a charmer, but with that edge that makes people who know him uneasy.  His life seems to trail from one embarrassment or disaster to the next. 

In the family of twentieth century American literature, that guy is Jim Thompson. 

There can be little doubt, almost fifty years after his death, that Thompson was a major writer of his  era.  This is clear from the fact that a good many of his works are still in print and readily available, as well as from the number of positive comments and reviews those works still receive from appreciative readers. It’s clear, too, from his growing reputation.  Most importantly, it’s clear from the quality of the novels themselves.  

This doesn’t mean that Thompson is easy to cozy up to.  His fiction is where American pieties go to die.  Here, the cracks in the structure of the American Dream don’t just show, they split and swell to engulf everything.  It’s a vicious world where upward mobility is a myth and the Algerian idea that luck, pluck, and virtue win the day is nothing but a bad April Fools’ joke.  It’s hard to imagine any use for the wisdom of Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard in a Jim Thompson book.  In a world of madness and brutality, the only thing to do is scrabble hard for whatever you can get to survive . . . and to hell with who gets hurt in the process.  

Such a vision naturally makes many readers uneasy.  That doesn’t mean, however, it ought to be dismissed.  As readers and as human beings, we need to assess the dark, nihilistic spirals of madness, lust, and violence Thompson creates.  To me, this seems like a conversation that needs to take place: reckoning with Thompson's brutal vision forces us to grapple with the underside of U.S. history and culture. 
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I think such books as The Killer Inside Me, The Golden Gizmo, and The Grifters (to name just a few) are more than thrilling tales about psychologically damaged losers making a mess of things.  Thompson had been a young man just starting to make his way in the world in 1929, when the market crashed and the depression gutted the U.S. economy.  His books are unflinching excavations of what happens to the people left behind when everything goes to hell.

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