“The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne”: Ron Currie’s Daring Dive Into Truth, Tragedy, and the Glorious Mess of Modern America

A Flame That Refuses to Behave: The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne and the Burden of Seeing Too Much

It begins with an ache and a question—What happens when a woman becomes the symbol of everything we can’t fix? In The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, Ron Currie doesn’t just offer a novel. He delivers a literary Molotov cocktail—explosive, illuminating, and hard to ignore. This is not a book that eases you in. It shouts, mourns, and mocks, all while daring you to laugh with tears still on your face.

At its center is Babs Dionne—a character who is at once too real and mythically unreal, a woman you might’ve passed in a small-town parking lot, but whose legacy unspools like a fever dream through a media-obsessed, emotionally stunted America. Her “savage, noble death” is a phrase that drips with both reverence and irony, and Currie ensures that we are never quite sure which dominates.

The novel’s structure feels intentionally unhinged—fragmented, recursive, more essayistic and experimental than straightforward. But that’s its brilliance. This is a book mimicking the very world it condemns: overexposed, frenetic, tender in its ugliest corners. Through this kaleidoscope of perspectives—commentators, family, strangers, ghosts—Currie stitches a narrative that isn’t really about how Babs died, but how we live with the stories we tell about people like her.

His prose veers from hilariously caustic to painfully intimate. “Sometimes,” a narrator reflects, “truth and spectacle wear the same dress to the funeral.” That line lingers. It captures the thematic heart of the novel: our compulsive need to make tragedy legible, consumable—even beautiful.

But beneath the layers of biting satire, what surprises is the sorrow. Currie doesn’t let the cleverness mask the hurt. There’s deep empathy pulsing beneath the sharp edges—an awareness of how profoundly lonely it is to be both seen and misunderstood by the entire world.

Who Should Read This

The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne is for readers who crave literary fiction that’s unafraid to get messy—fans of Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, or Ottessa Moshfegh will find themselves both unsettled and deeply moved. It’s a novel for those who want stories that dissect culture with a scalpel and still manage to whisper something tender before the final cut. If you’re tired of fiction that plays it safe, let this one wreck you.