Incubator Noir
Reviews
By Travis Woods
In the final scene of Blood Simple, the noir-pulped 1984 debut of desperation (criminal, sexual, rural) from the Coen brothers, the film’s leisure-suited detective and part-time hitman lies gunshot and bleeding beneath a bathroom sink. His eyes fix upon the hard complexity of interwoven pipes above him, the crisscrossing iron and copper that in their relentless twistery reflect the Rube Goldbergian nature of the plot that has delivered him to his place of dying—the misunderstandings and mixed messages, the crimes and the counter-crimes, the betrayals and the betrayed, the hard country and the people it makes country-hard—and he laughs. He laughs and he laughs and he laughs at the unremitting madness of it all, until there is finally nothing left to laugh about and only dying yet to be done.
One gets the sense that the characters of Broiler might do the same—either those who survive the long weekend of the novel or those who do not—were they the laughing types. But they are not, nor is the book itself, a grim, heartbroken (sometimes heartbreaking) work that pushes its way through its own ever-escalating series of intense criminal convolutions to a final, shocking denouement that leaves no room for laughter but perhaps just enough breathing room for a kind of embittered hope.
Written by Eli Cranor, author of 2022’s excellent Don’t Know Tough (winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel) and 2023’s bruising, brooding country-noir Ozark Dogs, the strange and somber Broiler is the latest in his ongoing exploration of criminal rurality. Rurality not just in terms of geography (the book mostly takes place in the country that outskirts the large industrial interzone of Springdale, Arkansas, a landscape alternately acned with run-down trailers and sprawled with ground-devouring mansions), but also a rurality of spirit, peopled as it is with characters living so remotely from their own dreams as to be figuratively rendered fugue-like and resembling distant blips on the countryside not just to people around them, but to themselves.
That is, until their remoteness is shattered by a crime, one involving a baby’s squall and Johnny Cash’s drawl, a crime borne beneath the looming dark of a massive chicken processing plant’s shadow. Broiler is the story of two couples, one an undocumented pair working at the Springdale chicken factory Detmer Foods, the other that plant’s manager and his potentially suicidally postpartum wife. Between the double duos is a brutally impenetrable gulf of wealth, class, history, and race, one that holds up the lifestyles of the latter like a cruel, unattainable dream, and renders the lives of the former as transactional, alien (in every sense of the word) to the latter.
Then all four lives are cataclysmically hurled across that gulf, collision-course style, by two infants. The first is the miscarried fetus of Gabriela Menchaca and Edwin Saucedo, high school sweethearts turned Detmer Foods wage slaves. While Gabriela was a sharp student with a bright future, Edwin was always something of a dim, hope-sapped lost cause. Thanks to a desultory mix of fate, circumstance, and economics, they ended up together as a couple, then as trailer-park roommates, then as brutalized coworkers at Detmer—where undocumented workers are so exploited that they must wear diapers rather than be afforded bathroom breaks while snipping, snapping, and breaking the bodies of chickens on the line. Rather than wear diapers, Gabriela simply refused to drink water. In her dehydration, her unborn child died within her.
The second infant is Tuck, the six-month-old child of Luke and Mimi Jackson. Luke manages the Detmer processing plant where Gabriela and Edwin work beneath the boot of his draconian labor practices that break their bodies as efficiently as the workers break the chickens. Luke was born into poverty, and thanks to a combination of his obsessive, relentless work ethic and the advantages of his skin color and sex, Luke is on the cusp of wealth and success beyond the reach of Gabriela’s or Edwin’s wildest imagination. Meanwhile, living in the same mansion yet seemingly light years away is his wife, Mimi, gripped by a postpartum depression so severe that she finds herself tempted to crash her car with Tuck in the back seat.
And when Edwin—reeling from Gabriela’s miscarriage and the dreams he feels it has stolen from him—is fired by Luke in the Detmer parking lot for showing up to work late and grousing about Gabriela’s health, he spies Tuck sitting in the back of the Jackson family car listening to Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” and makes a terrible, desperate decision: a kidnaping that will tornado into an escalatory series of moves and countermoves between two increasingly unbalanced men, each act of war between them exponentially havocking throughout these four adults’ lives and exploding their every secret, unstitching their every lie, threatening their every remaining hope and dream. The two men, stupid and thick with hate, hurt, and entitlement, lock into a death spiral with one another while their women watch in dread-mute horror.
Broiler may feature a crime at its center, but it isn’t a crime novel. Not really. It’s something far stranger, far more surreal, far more reaching, using as it does everything from America’s class sociopolitics to Southern culture to the grisly atrocity exhibition of a chicken processing plant as a vivid backdrop to what is a character-driven horror-noir psychodrama about the relationships and expectations between brutishly childlike men and the shell-shocked, exhausted women who are stuck with them. Both Edwin and Luke view their female partners as literal and figurative incubators of their dreams—Gabriela and Mimi are expected to produce perfect children and perfect home lives for their men. When Gabriela fails at one and Mimi the other, those men lose their fractious holds on reality and turn on each other, with little Tuck caught between them as a kind of tortured tug-of-war rope.
The book’s most fascinating, compelling sequences, though, occur in the book’s second half and have little to do with the Two-Day War of the progressively more insipid and dangerous men, and instead trace the arcs of the two mothers who are left in their wake, both of them mourning their lost children and lost potential and lost futures. Theirs is a haunted (and haunting) bond, one that steers Broiler far afield from the more expected tropes of “rural noir” and into a kind of bizarre, brazen, and—at-times—beautiful mood piece, an almost Socratic dialogue between two women, both living at the end of their particular worlds and wondering how they got there. Logic is skirted, reality is heightened, and in the dizzying complexity of moving parts engendered by the men whose lives have subsumed their wives’ own, Cranor creates a space for a kind of aching transcendence for these women, a hypnagogic long night of the soul(s) in which decisions every bit as consequential as Edwin’s are made, and a wholly unexpected reckoning comes down.
At one point in Broiler, one secretive character muses to another, “Nobody should have to know how the sausage is made. It just tastes good, and that was good enough for me. But now?” Cranor’s newest isn’t a book designed to attack the grotesque policies of modern American poultry plants (though it still manages that), nor is it meant as a tract against the exploitation of undocumented workers (though it does that, too, blisteringly so). Instead, it is a book about the mysteries that exist between those who should be closest to one another. The mysteries of love, of childbirth, of creation, of lifelong partnership. It lies beneath the sink of human relationships, eyes fixed upon the hard complexity of interwoven pipes above, and tries to make sense of the cold, twisting metal it finds there. The answers it discovers likely won’t lead to endless laughter but they will remain with you all the same, long after this odd, fine novel has come to its wrenching close.
Travis Woods lives and writes in Los Angeles. As a teen, he stole the Corvette of a WBO world heavyweight boxing champion. He has a dog and a tattoo of Elliott Gould smoking. Bob Dylan once clapped him on the back and whispered something incomprehensible. He always keeps a Jim Thompson paperback in his back pocket and a karambit knife in his boot. These are the only interesting things about him.
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