Savage Holiday by Richard Wright

 Savage Holiday by Richard Wright

This is a well performed, gripping page turner, melodramatic crime novel.
It starts out with the main character Erskine Fowler being booted out of his high level job at a Manhattan insurance company. He is only 43, but started there at 13 so has 30 years of service to the company. They give him a big send off with a nice pension and a gold medallion commemorating his service. He just goes along with it after a tepid attempt to stand up for himself.
  One reason he doesn’t want to go is that the job has kept him busy for 6 days a week all these years and he knows within himself that there is something deeply wrong with him. It is something buried and the career activity has kept it out of sight, unavailable for him to either deal with or be troubled by.
 
  It is a rather slapstick Rube Goldberg machine of events that lead him into the horrible tragedy that he is directly involved in. The rest of the novel is taken up with his covering up for that.
Through the course of the story he discovers this thing in his past that he has suppressed but it is too late to keep that from being transferred to a heinous crime.

In the story backdrop of all this Wright looks a male/female relationships, the treatment and image of women. It’s from the mid-1950s and that shows in how the widow character Mabel is portrayed. She is neglectful of her son, but in a setting of a woman alone in a hard world attempting to make a living. She is an independent woman in a very judgmental world and the novel points out the injustice and ultimate tragedy of this as well as the damage to neglected sons of mothers consumed by getting by in the world given them. No one here to love, the most appealing character being Mabel the “loose woman” widowed mother. The forced into retirement insurance man is a troubled, guilt ridden, suppressed Christian Sunday School teacher wackjob, the neglected son set to transform and extend that early psychological damage.


This is a well done hardcore experimental 1950s tragic crime novel