Book Review : Jon Bassoff - Corrosion (2013)
Every time he tried getting up I gave him a good hard kick to the stomach or to the face. I wanted him to know a few things.
The more you learn about the publishing business, the more you understand it's not a business where originality is rewarded. Someone has a ''marketable” idea, gets the coporate machine behind it, makes a fortune and then whoever missed the boat on that author tries to sign as many copycats as possible. Big time publishing can get boring quick and real authors often have to go through small presses to get their work out.
Jon Bassoff's CORROSIONis a rare occurrence of an original and marketable creation. Its publication has created a strong buzz in the genre fiction community, but if it had been a movie rather than a novel, it would be the hot thing all over America right now.
There are three narrators in CORROSION: Joseph, Benton and Reverend Wells. The disfigured veteran, the young hilbilly weirdo and the masked preacher *. The story is centered about Joseph's car breaking down in a small mountain town. On his first night, he meets Lilith, a tortured woman with a taste for men who are not her husband. They have an affair, but it becomes clear Lilith isn't with Joseph only for his talents in the sack. She has her own agenda, but her reckless selfishness awakes something very deep, hidden inside Joseph. Hidden at the heart of the mountains. Some people are like that. They create their own destruction.
CORROSION has a very unique approach. It's dreamlike, almost theatrical, like a David Lynch movie. In fact, if David Lynch adapted a Jim Thompson boozed-soaked nightmare and had Cormac McCarthy writing the script, you'd get something along the lines of CORROSION. I know the Lynch reference is easy, almost clich when reviewing mystifying material, but the way Jon Bassoffkeeps deceiving the reader's expectations and deceiving their need for resolution reminded me of Lynch's playful approach. Replace the Norman Rockwell America backdrop by Cormac McCarthy's dark, rotting and isolated mountains and you get an idea of what CORROSION feels like.
There's no such thing as a good man. We're all guilty from the time we're born, and what God ought to do is stop us before we ever get going.
While CORROSION has an appealing, visual approach, it's not its defining variable. The plot is purposefully misleading, which is both good and bad. It's good because it serves a clear purpose: layering up the storyline and giving it a distinct identity. It's a novel that requires patience though because you will be left wondering where the hell this is going for pages at the time. That brings me to my biggest qualm about the novel (which isn't one, really). Jon Bassoff can seem to deliberately imitate iconic writers, namely Jim Thompson and William Faulker, during the different parts of his novel. I use the word ''seem'' because it serves the storyline AND a plot-related purpose (a good one), yet it bugged me as I was reading. Bear with it though, Bassoff makes it worth your while in the end.
Anyway, I liked CORROSION a lot. It might not have swept me off my feet, but it's a thorough piece of gothic-noir written with the meanest possible intentions. It's already getting a lot of success too.
David Foster Wallace once said that the purpose of literature was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable, well, I think Jon Bassoff achieved the latter with CORROSION. Everybody's sanity is at sake, even the reader's. Authors that dare challenging their reader's safety are too rare and that's why we need books like CORROSION to mix things up and keep us from softening up.
* That sounds like a pro-wrestler name, I know. Just bear with me.
