Title: Whiteout on Van Buren
Author: Don Winslow
Culture: American
Type: Short Story
Date Finished: 20th February 2010
The short story Whiteout on Van Buren by Don Winslow is a piece of neo-noir fiction about a vaguely described man named Jerry, who takes a walk in the hot weather of Phoenix, Arizona, being pestered by prostitutes along the way. He has been hired as a hit-man to kill another vaguely described man in a hotel apartment across the city. When he arrives, full of nerves, the story twists and he ends up getting shot or stabbed, and walks out into the front of the hotel and dies. Someone comes along and steals his money, while the man he was supposed to kill looks over him from a balcony, drinking icy alcohol.
Although I felt this a rather dreary and uncomfortable story, I found a bit of dry humour in it that gave me the giggles. The author put very little humour in this story, keeping within the noir tradition, but one comical piece of conversation without real substance is written, that is intentionally humouress, but intolerably so and in bad taste. This humour occurs when two men are talking about a Russian named Rosavich, who has come to Phoenix, and why a man from a cold, foreign country would be in America:
“Aren’t Russians supposed to like snow and sleighs and ice hockey and shit like that? Go after an Israeli, you expect to find him in the desert, not a Russian.” His friend then says “maybe he’s a Russian Jew.”
Winslow probably spent quite a bit of time crafting this thick punch-lined bit of humour, containing elements of uneducated American humour with many stereo-types that reflect the lack of social morals of some Americans, and it is humouress purely because of this irony, as I perceive it.
I disliked the way women were portrayed throughout the story, as they are treated by the author like the trash that is picked up every Tuesday morning, which made me uncomfortable. Winslow depicts his women as whores of desperation, graceless and self-degrading; the least spiritual form of existence; like carnal ragdolls bent on self-destruction. My ideals and experiences of those of the female existence are centred on the gracefulness, beauty, joy and creativity that they bring in to the world, Winslow seems to have ideals for the opposite, in my opinion, which is more or less closer to the wider reality. The example is in the opening, when the protagonist passes an alley on the way to his job and is confronted by a whore, who relentlessly pesters him to pay her for the use of her body, despite him consistently denying her. Winslow goes onto to write “women in Phoenix...They’re all whores”, in keeping with his fluently negative depiction of women. I believe all men and women are responsible for the words they create, whether in writing or speaking, and Winslow here is clearly trying to persuade the reader to take a negative perception of women, looking at them all as femme fatales, out to get money and power for the abuse they entreat, although this is the way women are used in all noir, to create some sense that everyone is corrupt, in my opinion.