All the King's Men Who Hate Women

Finally got around to reading Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer prize-winning novel.  We netflixed the movie** a couple years ago and it's a pale, poor ghost of the book. The book's dialogue is excellent throughout, which makes a certain sense because it was originally conceived as a verse play, and there are some passages that are wonderfully written:

Tom Stark, a sophomore, had made quarterback on the mythical All Southern Eleven and had celebrated by wrapping an expensive yellow sport job around a culvert on one of the numerous new speedways which bore his father's name.  Fortunately, a highway Patrol car, and not some garrulous citizen, discovered the wreck, and the half-empty bottle of evidence was, no doubt, flung into the night to fall in the dark waters of the swamp.  Beside the unconscious form of the Sophomore Thunderbolt lay another form, conscious but badly battered, for in the big yellow expensive sport job Tom had had with him a somewhat less expensive yellow-headed sport job, named, it turned out Caresse Jones.  So Caresse wound up in the operating room of the hospital and not in the swamp.  She obligingly did not die, though in the future she would never be much of an asset in a roadster.

There is a lot packed into a few lines here; telling you just about everything you need to know about Willie Stark's son, his relationship with his father, the character of of the state police, and a taste of that time and place's view of the role of certain young women in society.


There are unfortunately many other times when Warren gets in his own way.  One of many possible examples that starts off well, giving great insight to Jack Burden's mind:

I had loved Lois the machine, the way you love the filet mignon or the Georgia peach, but I definitely was not in love with Lois the person.  In fact, as the realization grew that the machine-Lois belonged to, and was the instrument of, the person-Lois (or at least to the thing which could talk), the machine-Lois which I had innocently loved began to resemble a beautiful luscious bivalve open and pulsing in the glimmering deep and I some small speck of marine life being drawn remorselessly."

but this is immediately followed by:

Or it resembled the butt of wine in which the duke was drowned [..blah blah blah..].  Or it resembled a greedy, avid, delicious quagmire [..yadda yadda yadda..].  Or so, I recall, it seemed.

Which undermines the original comparison.  Choose a single simile, Robert!  You might argue that since the book is written in first person, this kind of waffling is in Jack Burden's character.  I don't consider that a good excuse for ruining a good paragraph.  Of course, it's also entirely possible that the stuff that drives me crazy when I read All the King's Men is a stylistic thing that was considered good writing back in the 40's; maybe it's like how I can't stand how Olivier does Shakespeare.  I still want to go back in time with Ezra Pound's blue pencil and trim all the fat out of this.  The casual misogyny is also distracting (pretty much every woman gets the same treatment as Lois and the yellow-headed sport job), but at least I know that's a product of the era.  

Aaaand, speaking of casual misogyny, Sarah finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo just before we saw the movie last week.  I should probably hold my tongue until I've read the book, but... this is basically a perfectly good mystery/thriller*** EXCEPT that the entire subplot with Bjurman doesn't work at all in the movie and (according to Sarah) is far more graphic than the book.  Who is this being filmed for?  

** the 1949 version; we have some standards, here.

*** though seriously, Nazis? isn't there some form of Godwin's law that should go into effect here?  maybe the trope isn't as trite in Sweden as it is in the U.S.; he gets a mulligan, I guess...