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A review by twilliamson
Home Is the Sailor by Day Keene
3.0
Day Keene's Home Is the Sailor, first published in 1951, is as condensed a take on pulpy noir as anyone's likely to find. It combines just about everything the genre uses as its standard: a ham-fisted, tough-jawed protagonist runs across a hot dame who isn't anything like she portrays herself to be, and winds up having to slug his way through trouble as the persistently wronged underdog.
Keene's prose is pretty snappy, if overly reliant on sentence fragments for rhythm, and his dialogue is a little bland, but his euphemisms are pretty strong, and his plot is pretty tightly packed. There's just no wasted space in a novel like this; it's meant to be consumed in a handful of hours and discarded just as easily, but that doesn't mean it's at all a real waste of time.
What keeps this one back from true greatness is that it just doesn't feel as transgressive or as subversive as other novels in the HCC lineup. Keene's noir-style chops are pretty solid, but that's all he really offers here. There's no real chewy sexual politics or philosophical nuance to his ham-fisted rowdiness, and as a result I think the overt sexism of the novel doesn't age well; I found myself hating the protagonist of the story more and more as the book continued, and I'm not entirely certain that was really Keene's point. In a tale that does intend to blur the lines between what is good and what is bad--ostensibly what "noir" fiction often aims to accomplish--I think it's a little regrettable that Swede makes out in the end like a hero as opposed to the highly problematic figure he really is.
But that, in a line, is what a lot of these 1950s potboilers really are: a snapshot of the many ideological problems behind cultural reproduction of masculinity in a post-WWII world. This is a fascinating text not for its subversiveness, but for the way it seems to reiterate a trend in more conventional or even conservative imaginations of masculinity and femininity after a period of tremendous horror.
For what it's worth, I think the book's pretty damn good, even if I resolutely think it's not something everyone will enjoy. I think it's very much a product of its times, and reflecting on what those times were and what this book says about popular media consumption at that time may well be a worthy endeavor.
Keene's prose is pretty snappy, if overly reliant on sentence fragments for rhythm, and his dialogue is a little bland, but his euphemisms are pretty strong, and his plot is pretty tightly packed. There's just no wasted space in a novel like this; it's meant to be consumed in a handful of hours and discarded just as easily, but that doesn't mean it's at all a real waste of time.
What keeps this one back from true greatness is that it just doesn't feel as transgressive or as subversive as other novels in the HCC lineup. Keene's noir-style chops are pretty solid, but that's all he really offers here. There's no real chewy sexual politics or philosophical nuance to his ham-fisted rowdiness, and as a result I think the overt sexism of the novel doesn't age well; I found myself hating the protagonist of the story more and more as the book continued, and I'm not entirely certain that was really Keene's point. In a tale that does intend to blur the lines between what is good and what is bad--ostensibly what "noir" fiction often aims to accomplish--I think it's a little regrettable that Swede makes out in the end like a hero as opposed to the highly problematic figure he really is.
But that, in a line, is what a lot of these 1950s potboilers really are: a snapshot of the many ideological problems behind cultural reproduction of masculinity in a post-WWII world. This is a fascinating text not for its subversiveness, but for the way it seems to reiterate a trend in more conventional or even conservative imaginations of masculinity and femininity after a period of tremendous horror.
For what it's worth, I think the book's pretty damn good, even if I resolutely think it's not something everyone will enjoy. I think it's very much a product of its times, and reflecting on what those times were and what this book says about popular media consumption at that time may well be a worthy endeavor.