Street of No Return

Skid Row Meets Helltown

David Goodis' 1954, "Street of No Return" is the final work in a collection of five novels by Goodis in a recent Library of America volume: "David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s". Goodis (1917 -- 1967) was living in his parents' home in Philadelphia when he wrote "Street of No Return" which was published as an inexpensive pulp paperback. In his younger years, Goodis had written for Hollywood and his novels have the movies in view. In 1968, Samuel Fuller directed a movie version of "Street of No Return" starring Keith Carradine and Valentina Vargas. Edited by Robert Polito, the LOA volume preempts the 1987 edition of Goodis' novel I am reviewing here, which included Polito's valuable and still-accessible introduction.

This is a poetical novel of lonely, failed people and outcasts set in a cold late November in the Philadelphia slums of the late 1940s or early 1950s. It it is set in two adjacent neighborhoods along the river: Skid Row, the home to derelicts and alcoholics with no place to go and no prospects and Helltown. The latter community, three blocks from Skid Row, is in a condition of racial ferment, as new residents from Puerto Rico and the earlier residents come to violence and rioting against one another.

The book tells the story of Eugene Lindell, 33, a seven-year resident of Skid Row who goes by the name of "Whitey" due to his prematurely white hair. Lindell has two companions, Phillips and Bones. As the novel begins, the three men are outdoors on a frigid day and thirsting for alcohol. When Lindell chances to see a man from his past on the street, he follows him to Helltown, beginning the connection of the two communities in Goodis' tale. With the ongoing Helltown riots, Lindell stops in an effort to assist a policeman who has been clubbed to death. The policeman dies in his arms, and two arriving patrolmen arrest Lindell for his murder.

As the book develops, the reader learns a great deal about Lindell. He had been a popular singer with a promising future before he fell for a dancer and former prostitute, Celia, the common law wife of Sharkey, a small-time gangster with large ambitions. Sharkey's two thugs, Bertha and Chop, beat Lindell to a pulp, almost destroying his voice while totally destroying his ambition.

The book turns on character and atmosphere. Goodis makes the reader feel the poverty and hopelessness of lonely streets and people in Skid Row and Helltown. In a short novel, Goodis develops place through character. Besides Lindell and his two Skid Row companions, Goodis introduces many other failed, isolated individuals who are formulaic in part but sharply and individually etched in the mind. The characters include a police captain and his two lieutenants, Sharkey and his minions, a Puerto Rican gang leader, Gerardo, and his cowed, frightened assistants, and an aged African American man, Jones Jarvey, who understands Lindell and recounts his own story. Jarvey begins:

"Every man has an ax to grind. Whether he knows it or not.... I've been on this earth a long time... I'm eighty-six. That makes me too old to grind the ax. But the Lord knows I did it when I was younger. Did it with all the strength in my body. And don't think I wasn't scared when I did it. So scared I wanted to turn and run and hide in the woods. Much safer that way. Much healthier. Buth there's some things more important to a man than his health."

The plot of the book is contrived. It turns on coincidence, a lengthy scene of eavesdropping, and an implausible twist to the story of racial tension and rioting in Helltown. "The Street of No Return" remains a strong, brutal and sad novel with its rawness, depictions of place and character, and lyricism.

I have enjoyed getting to know the novels of David Goodis through the Library of America volume. Writing in a formulaic medium, he captured a world of sadness and isolation in books of a strange beauty and insight.

Robin Friedman