Once Upon a Pulpy Novel
In recent years, an often-quoted Quentin Tarantino interview has led to increased speculation. He has maintained from long ago that he’ll stop making movies after his 10th film. When asked the obvious “what’s next” question, he said he’d probably write novels. Turns out we didn’t have to wait till he retired from filmmaking to see what a Tarantino novel would be like.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: a novel is as pulpy and enjoyable as you might imagine. It has all the familiar signature storytelling techniques of a Tarantino film. The dialogue is of course familiar to anyone who has watched the film, but it also has the sharp ring of any back-and-forth between Tarantino characters. The prose is the novel element, pun intended. Here is where the true homage to old American pulp fiction is to be found. It’s rich in descriptions and similes, but not trying to break the pulp form. In the lowest of brows, it’s not afraid of being dirty, rude, or politically and factually incorrect. And it’s distinct. Tarantino’s prosaic voice is as unique and clear as his cinematic voice.
On the other hand, this novel has the distinct air of being written by someone who knows it will sell. If nothing else, I respected JK Rowling’s approach, after Harry Potter, to publish a book under a pseudonym just to see how it would go. It seems to me like Tarantino might have gone too far relying on his readers’ familiarity with his film, as it can be played to the book’s advantage but also to its detriment. Take a careful reader who hasn’t seen Tarantino’s films and and give them this novel to read, and I suspect they’d be disappointed by a few elements. The most important of these is the lack of an ending. What Tarantino may have perceived as a satisfying end-point of Rick Dalton’s internal conflict as a character ends up being a flat closing point of a story that is removed enough from the original film’s narrative structure to float on the printed page without a structure at all, unlike the cliched but consistent pulp novels it’s emulating. At the end of the day, it walks like a novel, it talks like a novel, but it’s really supplementary material for a far superior film.
I say “homage” to pulp fiction, but it may very well be a natural influence of pulp on Tarantino’s genuine attempt at forming his writing style in novel form. We’ll have to wait for his second novel, if it is completely new to audiences and not an adaptation, to see whether it’s homage or caricature, and whether Tarantino the novelist can claim his spot in these new sphere the same way he did in filmmaking. For now, it’s an enjoyable read either way.
