I've read this book because I watched the cult movie last year and LOVED IT. You may imagine how many expectations and fears I had before reading it.
Midnight cowboy is a dramatic novel that tells the story of Joe Buck, a young man who decides to leave his work as a dishwasher in Houston to travel to New York dressed as a cowboy, in order to become a prostitute there.
You can guess he has a hard time in the city, but eventually, after collecting traumas after traumas, he will find what he really seeked for his whole, lonely life: a human connection. And he will find it in the last person you can imagine.
What I love about the novel: I love how Midnight cowboy tackles trauma. In fiction I often see traumas like "my father tied me to the radiator and beat me everyday when I was a child, now I want to burn the world/I was raped 20 times and now I cry everyday and I'm always angry against everyone". It's not like they don't exist, but they are not so common and relatable as the trauma that I see depicted in this book. Joe wasn't truly mistreated, beaten or else by the women who raised him, but he was totally neglected and left to himself. And he copes with this loneliness by acting incredibly stupid and naive. But that's how most traumas usually manifest themselves: not through a conscious, super evident anger, but through behaviours that seem a bit off and usually go unnoticed.
I also love the fact that the victim is a man, not a woman. It's much more difficult to find such an intimate story for a man in fiction, especially because Joe's life was ruined by women, who brought him up neglectfully or even abused him. And it's all the more refreshing if you consider that this book was written in the mid sixties by an American author.
The book has also universal themes, and I love them. While not so many people (hopefully) share the same horrible life of Joe Buck, me included, it's very easy to relate to him. There is a bit of Joe Buck inside everyone of us, everytime we feel lonely and each time we find ourselves through a human connection.
Because that's what happen in this novel: eventually Joe, after so many years of feeling lost and alone in the world, finds himself. And he does it by bonding to Rico Rizzo, a petty italo-american criminal, the last person we could imagine he would bond with. Seeing the relationship that these two broken individualds build, and seeing the positive impact it has on Joe, it warmed my heart. I've always loved when characters have unlikely and unexpected bonds. And Rico is such a great character, with both his fragility and dignity.
But here we come to what I deem to be the only negative of this novel.
The movie does a better job in telling the friends' character development. It sounds absurd, I know, but the bromance in the book has less content than the movie. The book is more Joe-centric, so it focuses for a good while on telling the backstory of the main character. After he starts his friendship with Rico, we unfortunately don't get many interactions before, well, the book comes to its final stages. We just get a summary.
On the other hand, the movie is much more succinct about Joe's previous life, but we get to see many different bromance scenes. After Joe and Rico start their bromance, we see very clearly how they try to survive together in the urban jungle, their dreams, we see how their bond becomes deeper and deeper, heck, they interact and have dialogues. That's much more effective than a simple summary, where we don't get any dialogue at all. And of course, the result is that in the movie I grew fond of Rico much more than in the book, so the final tragedy had a lower emotional impact in the latter.
However, the ending in the novel devastated me and it's one of the things I loved more about it. I don't know how to describe it. It's raw and unmerciful, and a true gut punch, still it has an infinite sweetness. It's heartwarming because we see how Joe has matured, but at the same time it's sad because he has strange and violent emotional reactions. The movie has an incredible ending on its own, but even it couldn't replicate the atmostphere of the ending of the novel. This is one of the best endings I've ever read.
by FanX99