Backwoods ballad

IF William Faulkner lived in the Ozark Mountains today and wrote short, powerful novels set in that little-understood, much-maligned swath of rural America, he might sound a lot like Daniel Woodrell.

The Missouri native has won praise for his redneck noir style and his lyrical descriptions of the Ozarks’ natural beauty in such works as “Give Us a Kiss” and “The Death of Sweet Mister.” His prose crackles with exuberant regional dialogue and ferocious depictions of class differences, something we Americans like to pretend ended when we threw off the yoke of George III. In a Woodrell novel, tragedy and black humor share the page, but there is also great humanity as characters fight their (usually) losing battles with fate.

Those prodigious talents are on full display in “Winter’s Bone,” his eighth novel. But instead of resting on past laurels, Woodrell burrows ever deeper into the heart of Ozark darkness, weaving a tale both haunting in its simplicity and mythic in scope.

“Winter’s Bone” tells the story of Ree Dolly, a dirt-poor high school dropout who must track down her father before creditors seize the house that Dad, a meth chef named Jessup Dolly, put up as collateral for a court appearance before he disappeared. Failure, as they say, is not an option -- or else Ree, her 9- and 10-year-old brothers and their vacant-eyed, crazed mother will be turned out into the Ozark woods. Oh, and did I mention that it’s the dead of winter?

Ree is “brunette and 16, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes.” Wearing a yellow dress that flutters in the wind, her Mamaw’s old black coat and combat boots, she is “scarce at the waist but plenty through the arms and shoulders, a body made for loping after needs.”

Woodrell sets up his novel as a classic quest -- with a twist. Ree is lukewarm about her jailbird father’s fate, but she dreams of escaping into the Army in two years. She needs to know that her brothers will have enough to eat, a roof over their heads and a semi-functional adult watching over them before she goes. And so she heads into the woods to find him.

With the tenacity of a bluetick hound, Ree hacks through the kudzu of lies, half-truths and casual cruelties meted out by far-flung members of her surly clan -- who have their own reasons for hiding Jessup’s whereabouts. Threatened and savagely beaten, Ree perseveres, walking through a sleet storm to throw herself at the mercy of distant kin on a remote mountain. “Please -- I am a Dolly!” Ree shouts. “Some of our blood at least is the same. That’s s’posed to mean somethin’ -- ain’t that what is always said?”

Woodrell takes us unflinchingly inside this society, showing us the complex stew of pride, fatalism, kinship, ignorance, tradition, secrecy, lawlessness, isolation and poverty that robs these characters of a better life. Ree and her family live in a world at once ancient and modern, where methamphetamine is the new moonshine but individual destiny is still determined, just as in Old Testament times, by what clan you claim kinship with.

And that’s bad news for Ree, because the 200-member-plus Dolly clan is among the most blood-soaked in Rathlin Valley, “plenty peppery and hard-boiled toward one another, but were unleashed hell on enemies, scornful of town laws and town ways, clinging to their own.”

Woodrell paints such an archetypal portrait of rural hardship that we could be back in the pioneer era or the Great Depression (as seen through Dorothea Lange’s eyes) when we first meet Ree, chopping kindling in her yard at the edge of the woods and worrying because her brothers cry at having oatmeal again for dinner. It’s only when Ree pulls headphones out of her pocket that we lurch into modern times.

“Winter’s Bone” jumps with dialogue that is at once formal and demotic, with glorious rhythms and cadence and stuffed with such lovely words as “truckle,” “bantling” and “slickery.” Although the story is overwhelmingly Ree’s, Woodrell also gives us such marvelous creations as Uncle Teardrop, nicknamed for the blue ink tattoos below his eye that signify “grisly prison deeds that needed doing but didn’t need to be gabbed about.” A crank chef who’s on his fifth wife, despite a disfiguring “melt burn” on his face from a lab explosion, his motto is: “You got to be ready to die every day -- then you got a chance.”

Uncle Teardrop confounds and terrifies Ree, who tells him so one night. “That’s ‘cause you’re smart,” he retorts.

But Teardrop’s brutality toward his niece masks a devotion to kin. While warning her off the search, he also gives her $50. In a riveting scene when the clan assembles in a barn to decide Ree’s fate, the crank-snorting felon must finally decide what family means to him. Woodrell’s great gift is his ability to make our hinky feelings about Teardrop become more nuanced as Ree contemplates the twisted moral code the Dollys live by.

At one point, Ree holds Teardrop tight, smelling “the raw scent of him, the sweat and smoke, the roiling blood and spirit of her own. She felt she was holding somebody doomed who was already vanishing even as she squeezed her arms around his neck.”

Woodrell’s characters appear to step out of myth, Hellenic hillbillies who’ve traded hemlock for shotguns. Clan patriarch Thump Milton is “a fabled man, his face a monument of Ozark stone, with juts and angles and cold shaded parts the sun never touched.”

Then there’s Merab, Thump’s stout, white-haired wife, and her two equally spooky sisters, women with “faces like oaten loaves” who resemble the Furies in their cruel rage and “came with the dark and knocked with three fists.”

As the Rathlin Valley women cross the creek to inspect Ree, who lies in a tub of bloody water after being beaten, they evoke Amazon warriors girding for battle. They “stood in a cluster looking down at the colored bruises on milk skin, the lumped eye, the broken mouth. Their lips were tight and they shook their heads. Permelia, ancient but mobile, witness to a hundred wounds, said, ‘There’s never no call to do a girl like that.’ ”

This is stripped-down, powerful writing that has arrived at a much different place from where it began with “Under the Bright Lights,” Woodrell’s 1986 detective novel written in the comic noir style of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen.

His earliest books meandered through Louisiana’s Cajun Country; in the Ozarks, where he’s set his last four books, he has found his own Yoknapatawpha County. We first glimpsed the Dollys in 1996’s “Give Us a Kiss,” but they were sidelined as “a legendary clan for thievery and nasty shenanigans, legion in number, taking over three columns in the West Table phone book.”

Woodrell kicked things into higher emotional gear in 2001 with “The Death of Sweet Mister.” In “Winter’s Bone,” he has distilled his prose and themes without losing any of the lyricism.

Instead of playing the Dollys for slick laughs in Ree’s story, Woodrell does something harder -- he makes us empathize with people trapped in a world where crank is stored in baby food jars, “sprinkle cheese” for spaghetti is shunned as too expensive, and people have names like Cotton, Whoop, Catfish, Hog-jaw and Sleepy John.

Ree’s great hope is that her young brothers “would not be dead to wonder by age 12, dulled to life, empty of kindness, boiling with mean. So many Dolly kids were that way, ruined before they had chin hair, groomed to live outside square law and abide by the remorseless blood-soaked commandments that governed lives led outside square law.” The lineage from Faulkner to Woodrell runs as deep and true as an Ozark stream in this book. Sure, the water’s bobbing with trash and a few bodies these days, but it’s still flowing, as this new bard of the Ozarks proves with his most profound and haunting work yet.