Earl Thompson is the writer most people have never heard of. Those that have read him understand this and feel safe stealing from him. His time, they must innately feel, has come and gone, and won’t be round again ever.

I’d be just as dry on the subject if not for the poverty in my early twenties. A wizened lady opened a local paperback trading emporium, where you could bring any book in and use it to get other books. Bring those back when you’d read ‘em and start over. It worked for me—unemployed or underemployed, surviving on a lunchmeat sandwich a day, I could always find the governor’s sixteen cents to throw in on a dozen new old books.

Among the thousands of titles I found Thompson’s first book, A Garden of Sand. Great freaking title, from the get-go. Even if a fictionalized memoir of a desperate young boy’s survival in Depression-era Kansas wasn’t your first choice, how could you pass up a cover blurb that teased, in 22-point type, “Sex plus sex equals X-Rated Book”? OK, I’ll bite.

Yes, sex-plus-sex—all kinds, frankly fleshed out. But reducing Garden to one-handed holding  is like handing over Anais Nin to Harold Robbins. The sex is the string that usually runs out in hardboiled novels; here, it illuminates a phantasmic zoetrope of often bitter, always peripatetic Midwestern lowlife.

The book is anchored in the boyhood of a Swedish-American horndog named Jack Anderson, who is endlessly crawling through the runoff of the American Downturn. He is the receiver of fisticuffs from his prostitute mother’s thug boyfriend Bill, and the cynosure of store detectives’ eyes. Jack is clever as Huck Finn, but, well, hungry and evil. His mother joins the list of his desperate conquests.

Shocking? Sure, in our post-Reagan reality. In the early 70s, when Thompson was producing, this was the logical grit. It was the era of cute incest (Au Souffle de Coeur, for example), but Thompson was playing for keeps. He was heretical even in those open, quasi-Amsterdamned times.

Thompson followed this huge, exploring novel with a book just as big, but even better. Tattoo finds fourteen-year-old Jacky faking his birth cert to get into the fight in WW2. He’s ambivalent re patriotism: he just wants out of the welfare sandtrap. He boosts in—just in time for Japan’s surrender. But you know Jack will find opportunity for a whole new sordid evolution in decadent, war-strafed Asia. Like Tom Ripley, his nature is to zag in the zig world.

At one time, I had everything Earl Thompson had ever written. QED: There were only four books, make that three-and-a-half, and Thompson went AWOL on us—a coronary case at forty-eight. In my humble opine, he left two unrecognized classics of American Literature, as cited. His third book, Caldo Largo, was a kind of runaway student assignment, a shameless pastiche of Hemingway that should have stayed in his dormroom. The fourth, The Devil to Pay, was intended to wrap up a Jack Anderson trilogy, but it is flyweight and clearly something found and stretched out by an untalented literary executor. It reads like Harold Robbins—who is hopefully out of print by now.

The diptych however remains a sweet remorseless series of sorties through the American Nightmare, never afraid to cashier the main narrative so as to tail small-time operators on pulp fiction missions of self-destruction. Imagine Dos Passos as James Ellroy shot through with thirty-calibers of Jean Genet and Lester Dent. With helps from John Irving. For some reason, this passage sticks with me:

  Back-of-the-billboards boys, they knew their city the way Michelangelo, in a book of drawings that fascinated them one term, knew anatomy. “Man, he could draw a person from the inside out!” They knew what made the lights go on, where buses slept at night, how the city was fed, where the garbage was hauled. They had an intimate knowledge of what their town ingested, what it discharged and where the process could get hung up.  

Thompson rarely gets hung up. This despite a snobby line I ran into from some unremembered critic of the time: “Thompson is often in trouble, at least once every page.” It may be that Thompson was simply not one of the Literary Elect, or it may be that the critic was stunned by the fact that there is something actually happening on every page, which is uncommon with writers in general and hence may have confused the critic. Tattoo and Garden are always in Drive, and Earl doesn’t spare the horses. Whether it is a parrot that swears, a defloration in a Mexican graveyard, or an angry midget that emasculates a cowboy in a dirty fight, you will not find time to long yawn.

Earl Thompson is the kind of writer that can convince you that a lot of things have happened to him. He’s also the sort of writer who stuck his head up and noticed the people and the planet around him. He can communicate savage social criticism without being preachy—another thing that the critic probably confused with “being in trouble.” Thompson speaks of backyard hoods rubbing “twenty-eight coats of candy apple red” onto their prize roadsters and he wrote the same way: endless detail, endless texture. Sex plus sex ain’t all that, and it wasn’t all that he was.

I’ve only seen Earl Thompson’s name come up on the Innertube in the past year. Not much, though he has a Wikipedia page, although it more or less restrings his bio from the paperbacks. I’d like to know more. I wrote the executor and the publisher years ago, but you know how that goes. I offer this review humbly as the only critical review that I know of on the web. Hopefully it won’t be the last.

Can a man get in the classics game with only two books? If they can let in John Kennedy O’Toole with only one, it seems Earl should have a shot. He just might make you rethink the passions and the lives of our most forgotten, and often most despised, citizens.