Bonnie and Clyde: A Love Story (review)

Bill Brooks's latest novel is a lovely, lighthearted yet sinister piece of "what-if " fiction centering on the possibly most legendary outlaws of the twentieth century—Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow—whose four-year crime spree across the South and Midwest became the stuff of legends, a controversial hit movie and countless books.

Unlike most other fictionalized treatments of Bonnie and Clyde's exploits, Brooks's novel focuses mostly on the infamous pair's romantic and sexual relationship rather than on the many robberies and murder sprees they committed, which in this novel serve merely as a backdrop for a tale of star-crossed lovers. Brooks, a popular author of historical and Western genre fiction, weaves this strange love story using simple prose and a straightforward narrative that creates a detailed picture of rural life during the Great Depression—everything from Ford V-8s and secret "blind pig" bathtub-gin parties to "picture shows," pulpy detective magazines and "tourist courts"—the 1930s equivalent of today's Motel 6's, and the Barrow gang's preferred hideout between jobs.

Brooks also examines head-on a topic often avoided by other Bonnie and Clyde storymakers—Clyde Barrow's ambiguous, almost neuter sexuality, which is oddly complemented by Bonnie Parker's ravenous and aggressive sexual appetite. Most historians have agreed that Barrow was, at the very least, less sexually vigorous than Parker, while some have gone so far as to say that Barrow was bisexual or even a latent homosexual in denial about his sexual identity. While the 1968 film depicted the couple's relationship as asexual and Clyde as a virgin until Bonnie very nearly raped him two-thirds into the film, in Brooks's novel Clyde is a man traumatized by the rapes and physical abuse he suffered by other men while serving his first prison sentence for robbery. Clyde's indifference frustrates Bonnie, whose attempts to cajole him into lovemaking are often rebuked.

As a result, Brooks imagines Bonnie seeking sexual satisfaction elsewhere— with Clyde's criminal associate Ray Hamilton, with a straitlaced accountant when Clyde is away in prison, with bootleggers and random workingmen she meets in speakeasies. Brooks even imagines that Ted Hinton, a Texas Ranger who pursued Bonnie and Clyde on their cross-country rampages and helped orchestrate their final capture, had fallen in love with Bonnie while she was still working as a waitress, years before her life of crime began.

Even if Clyde leaves her sexually unsatisfied, a different, deeper kind of bond keeps Bonnie and Clyde together through every phase of their violent relationship, and when they die in a cloud of bullets, Bonnie's dying thoughts are for her enigmatic lover. Bonnie and Clyde: A Love Story is an intriguing piece of speculative history as well as a quick, pleasing read that will appeal to history buffs, romance lovers and literary fiction fans alike.