El matrimonio formado por Steve y Nancy Hogan no atraviesa un buen momento. A sus treinta y dos años, Steve, que siente enormes celos respecto los éxitos profesionales de su esposa, está inmerso en otro de sus excesos alchólicos, y ella, dos años mayor, va dejando que su carácter se agrie cada vez más y se torne insoportable. El Día del Trabajo (que en Estados Unidos se celebra el primero de septiembre) emprenden un viaje por carretera para recoger a sus hijos, que acaban de pasar unos días en un campamento de verano. Tras detenerse por el camino en varios bares, donde Steve bebe cada vez más compulsivamente, la pareja tiene un fuerte altercado y decide continuar camino cada uno por su lado. Ignoran, no obstante, que sus vidas están a punto de cruzarse con la de Sid Halligan , un peligrosísimo recluso que acaba de evadirse de la prisión de Sing-Sing...

OH MY GOD THAT WAS AMAZING. ( )

Pretty good psychological drama with a bit of suspense. It was written in the 1950s, and one thing that struck me is that when the main character uses a pay phone, he repeatedly gets the same switchboard operator, who remembers and recognizes him. Remember when the world was so small and intimate? It seems like we are all connected now, but it's an illusion. ( )

Red Lights by Belgian author Georges Simenon takes place in 1950s America, where nearly everyone drives a car and the highways are jam packed. And that's Red Lights as in all the red tail lights a driver sees when driving at night. “What got on his nerves was the incessant hum of wheels on either side of him, the headlights rushing to meet him every hundred yards, and also the sensation of being caught in a tide, with no way of escaping either to right or to left, or even of driving more slowly, because his mirror showed a triple string of lights following bumper-to-bumper behind him.”

Red Lights is vintage Simenon, a psychological study of a man pushed beyond his normal limits and conventional day-to-day routine, the type of non-Inspector Maigret novel the author himself termed romans durs or “hard novel,” as in hard on both his characters within the novel and readers of the novel. And it’s the sequence of psychological states of main character Steve Hogan during the time leading up to the story’s dramatic crisis I find particularly fascinating.

Steve’s private term – “going into the tunnel” – not a fit of rage but a slow burn down, a subterranean brick and mortar passageway into the dark recesses of his own psyche with prods, presses and jabs from the suffocating outside world serving as the bricks and intake of hard liquor as the mortar.

It all started in Manhattan after a long hot day at the office – as per usual, Steve meets his wife Nancy at their favorite midtown watering hole and, also as per usual, Nancy looks as fresh as fresh can be while Steve knows he looks like a sweaty beaten down dog. It’s the evening they will have to drive up to Maine to bring their two kids back from summer camp. Highway hell in the summer. Doesn’t this rate another drink? Nope. Nancy can sense he wants one for the road and tells him its time to leave.

Bumper-to-bumper traffic as soon as they get in their car and head for home on Long Island before the long trip north. No problem – once home Steve tells Nancy he’ll be back in a minute after he fills up the tank with gas and has the tires checked. While the car is being taken care of at the station, Steve pops in at a bar next door to have some whiskey. Steve knows he gets more annoyed with Nancy after he drinks but, damn, he has a hellish drive ahead of him.

Steve and Nancy get on the road with thousands of other cars crawling along in traffic; Steve can see each car has another Steve or Bill behind the wheel and another Nancy or Mary in the passenger seat. Enough to make a guy feel like a faceless nobody. And Nancy doesn’t have to give orders - map on her lap, Steve knows she is the one in charge, the one who will always know which turn to make and which roads to take. Switching from one slow lane to another even slower lane, one thing’s for sure – Steve needs another drink.

Back in the car, after his much needed drink (actually two stiff drinks), feeling manlier than ever, Steve has his own ideas about which way they should turn. Do you want to start a quarrel, Nancy? And don’t tell me I nearly went off the road! Simenon writes: “He was laboriously struggling to express something he felt, which he was convinced he had felt every day of his life throughout the eleven years they had been married. It was not the first time it happened, but now he was sure he had made a discovery that would enable him to explain everything. She would have to understand sometime, wouldn’t she? And the day she understood, maybe she’d try and treat him like a grown man.”

A few more bad turns, miles away from the main highway, Steve demands to stop for yet another drink. Nancy threatens if he does stop, she will leave. Steve stops, walks in the bar, knowing he has to teach Nancy a lesson. After a few much needed shots, Steve return to his car – Nancy is gone. But he does have a passenger – one Sid Halligan, an escapee from Sing Sing prison. Turns out, Steve finds somebody he can really talk to, someone who appreciates and understands sometimes it is necessary to “go off the tracks.”

What makes Simenon a great writer is his uncanny ability to make every single sentence count. We live through Steve’s going into his tunnel and off the tracks – Steve’s every move, his every thought, his shifting liquor-fueled emotions and feelings. Roger Ebert judged Simenon’s prose style as pure as running water. And as Anita Brookner writes in her Introduction: “Simenon deliberately scaled down his vocabulary to ensure that no potential reader, however humble, was excluded.” Are you an avid Simenon fan? Are you new to Simenon? Either way, Red Lights will make for one rewarding read, and that's for certain.


"He needed a mouthful of whiskey if he was to drive even passably well. His very safety required it. He was so feverish that he was continually afraid of jerking the wheel and colliding with the cars in the next lane." -- Georges Simenon, Red Lights ( )

Splendido romanzo psicologico che rappresenta in modo diretto e privo di sentimentalismi la crisi della coppia, incapace di dialogo, vittima delle abitudini. Opera noir profondamente "americana", che riesce a cogliere i caratteri della middle class statunitense e le sue nevrosi.
Dal libro è stato tratto "Feux rouges" un film del 2004 diretto da Cédric Kahn. ( )