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Cathedrals of Kudzu:
A Personal Landscape
of the South
Hal Crowther
Louisiana State University Press
192 pp.
$24.95
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Hal Crowther
is a rare animal. A personal essayist who is provocative as well
as evocative. A man who can show us the beauty that is the South
as well as point out its obvious (and sometimes not so obvious)
flaws. He is, it seems, powerfully positioned to define what,
precisely, that complicated thing called the South actually is.
Pause for a second and think about the title of his new essay
collection: Cathedrals of Kudzu. Kudzu: that pain-in-the-ass
vine that was imported into the South and pretty much took over
whatever it touched. In Crowther's metaphorical take, the vine
has turned the Southern landscape into the profile of a haunted
Gothic mansion, complete with spires and buttresses. It's a familiar
Southern form, but at the same time it is new, imported and definitely
suspect.
Nice image, huh?
He certainly casts a wide net. In these essays (many of which
first appeared in The Oxford American magazine),
Crowther passes his well-trained eye over Southern belles (remember
them?), snake-handling religions, guns, dogs, fathers, trees
and the remarkable Doc Watson. Never a wallflower when it comes
to his opinions, Crowther is most passionate when he explores
the life of James Dickey and tears at the constraints of political
correctness.
This collection is decidedly more affectionate than Crowther's
earlier Unarmed but Dangerous: Withering Attacks on All Things
Phony, Foolish, and Fundamentally Wrong with America Today (which
has been described as containing "something to offend just
about everyone"). Cathedrals of Kudzu reads more
like an appreciation of what the world was and could become.
There is a grim reality in Crowther's musings on the decline
of the small town, for instance, but these wonderful essays never
fall into the maudlin 'look at how the world could be' vein.
Time passes, and places change--even the South, no matter how
much we kick and scream and try to hold onto everything that
makes us what we are.
Not as cynical as Mencken (to whom he is often compared),
Crowther can turn a phrase with the best of them, and the essays
collected here are among his best.
--John Porter
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Never Too Late: A Prosecutor's Story of Justice
in the Medgar Evers Case
Bobby DeLaughter
Scribner
315 pp.
$27
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In October 1989,
twenty-six years after civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot
to death in his driveway, an article in a Jackson, Mississippi,
newspaper implied that the jury in the second of two murder trials
brought unsuccessfully against Evers's accused killer had been
tampered with. Inevitably, public reaction to the article divided
into two camps, with one side demanding that the district attorney
bring the case against Byron De La Beckwith to trial a third
time, and the other saying that too much time had passed to drag
the community through a divisive trial that was unlikely to yield
a conviction.
As Bobby DeLaughter, who was the assistant district attorney
in Jackson when the Evers case re-emerged in 1989, points out
in his emotionally gripping account of his (successful) prosecution
of Beckwith, the case initially seemed to offer a lose-lose proposition
for the D.A.'s office.
We say that no man is above the law; but what if he is seventy
years old? We claim that we value all human life; but what if
the life is that of a civil rights activist in 1963 Mississippi?
There is no statute of limitations for murder; but what if it's
been a quarter century? In pursuing justice and maintaining freedom,
how much taxpayer money is too much? Finally, if justice has
never been finalized in such a despicable and immoral atrocity
and pursuing it will open an old wound, instead of continuing
to fester over the years, spreading its poison to future generations?
Against political and legal advice, DeLaughter decided to
re-open the case, but he had his hands full: the physical evidence-the
gun, the bullet and the police photographs-were missing, as was
a transcript of the trial. And, to make matters worse, no one
was sure if the jurors and witnesses were even alive. While some
of the evidence was recovered (the murder weapon showed up in
an astonishingly unlikely place), the case never proved easy,
emotionally or strategically. "No matter which way I turned,"
DeLaughter writes, "I lost. If any supporters were in our
corner, they certainly didn't let us know about it. The only
one who had instilled in me a genuine desire to do anything for
the right reason was Myrlie Evers [Medgar's widow]."
Of course, as most of DeLaughter's readers will know (as well
as anyone who saw the movie The Ghosts of Mississippi,
in which Alec Baldwin portrayed DeLaughter), he did in fact win
a murder conviction against Beckwith, but he still manages to
make the story of the investigation and trial feel fresh and
even suspenseful. The late Mississippi writer Willie Morris had
encouraged DeLaughter to write this book, and it's easy to see
why: DeLaughter's characters are particularly well-drawn, his
writing voice is wonderfully Southern, and he has a knack for
making a scene come dramatically alive through strong, often
funny dialogue. Perhaps most importantly, though, DeLaughter
lends his story an emotional intensity that comes, it seems,
from two sources: his strong belief that Medgar Evers and his
family deserved redress and his equally strong sense that his
state's reputation was bettered by the Beckwith guilty verdict.
Highly recommended for both its suspense and moral / ethical
elements.
--Woody Arbunkle
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The Elementary Particles
Michel Houellebecq
Alfred A. Knopf
264 pp.
$25
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In The Elementary
Particles, Michel Houellebecq looks at humanity from the
large end of the telescope: even as he scrutinizes his characters'
most intimate traits, they seem small and distant.
The novel tells the story of two half-brothers, Michel and
Bruno, who find themselves ignored by their mother; a flower
child of the 1960s, she is preoccupied with the pursuit of what
used to be called free love. Houellebecq suggests it's not free
at all: her children pay the price. Separate threads of the novel
follow Michel and Bruno, who are raised apart. Cold and loveless
childhoods have their effect. Each brother is brilliant in his
way; each has a scientific bent; and each is decidedly strange.
Bruno's inability to relate to others comes out as sexual
perversion; obsessed with sex, he loses a teaching job after
exposing himself to one of his teenaged students. Michel grows
up cold, unable to connect with people, uninterested in sex;
when a beautiful woman expresses her love for him, he rejects
her with little more than a vague sense of disquiet.
The story of the brothers, Houellebecq suggests, is the logical
result of the me-first, pleasure-first philosophy of the '60s.
There is a fin de siecle exhaustion about these brothers,
as if they, and humanity, have burned out, reached the end of
the line.
Houellebecq portrays the humiliations of their childhoods
with abstract coldness. In describing Bruno's degradation at
a private school (his schoolmates have forced his head into a
toilet), the author makes this detached observation: "While
dominance and brutality are commonplace in the animal kingdom,
among higher primates, notably the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes),
weaker animals suffer acts of gratuitous cruelty. This tendency
is at its greatest in primitive human societies and among children
and adolescents in developed societies." The characters
seem to be under the scrutiny of someone very, very far away.
The reason for the narrator's sense of distance is revealed
in the last chapter. The novel was published in France two years
ago to great acclaim, and Houellebecq may have anticipated this
year's headlines when he has Michel pioneer a method of cloning
that changes humanity. The reader is pretty tired of humanity
too at this point and greets the prospect of momentous change
not with anxiety, but with relief.
For all its detachment, the book gets preachy at times when
it veers off into metaphysical discourse. "Every civilization
has had to find some way to justify the sacrifices parents make,"
Michel tells his brother at one point. What a way to sum up a
dysfunctional family, and a dysfunctional human race. And are
they--are we--worth caring about? The answer is yes--but before
we bring ourselves grudgingly to accept that humanity probably
is worthwhile after all, Houellebecq makes us think long and
hard.
--Arthur Alexander Parker
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Ordinary Horror
David Searcy
Viking
230 pp.
$24.95
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The title of
David Searcy's Ordinary Horror (remarkably, his first
novel) is as cunning as it is arresting. Where conventional (as
opposed to ordinary, I suppose) horror novels are peopled by
knife-wielding outsiders with obligatory bad childhoods, Ordinary
Horror gives us a seventy-year-old widower named Mr. Delabano
who likes to cultivate his rose garden and wouldn't hurt anything
more evolved than the gophers that seem to be running rampant
in his yard. And while the bizarre mail-order plants that Mr.
Delabano buys to control the gophers seem initially to offer
a standard-fare green monster run amok, Searcy is decidedly not
Stephen King. In fact, literary fiction fans looking for an intelligently
unnerving read should find him decidedly better than King.
Be forewarned, though: Searcy's proffered horror comes in
such a complicated, compressed package that only through careful,
close reading do we come to see how, precisely, the horror is
seated in Mr. Delabano's 'ordinary' suburban setting. Without
giving too much away, here are a few tantalizing clues. Mr. Delabano
is, first and perhaps foremost, obsessed with divisions: fences
that separate neighbors, the edge where suburban sprawl meets
the prairie, the point twenty feet up where the house stops and
space begins. On one side of the divide stands culture, of a
sort; on the other, an abyss, of sorts. The prairie that lies
beyond the suburban tract doesn't exactly represent entropy,
but the sky above it (particularly at night) certainly seems
to offer its fair share of agoraphobic horror--especially, Searcy
writes, for "younger people whose gaze is less constrained
and habitual, who are more likely to crane their necks to follow
footballs or tossed children or, just hanging around outside
at night, pay attention to the suddenness of the vertical transition
between home and space." And it's this underlying sense
of anxiety--unparticularized fear--that drives a good half of
Ordinary Horror.
Horror, Searcy seems to imply, is truly horrific only if we
can't define it merely as a fear of 'x' or 'y.' Take, for instance,
the passage in which he describes Mr. Delabano's difficulty in
recounting a terrifying incident to his wife: "It was hard
for him to express, somehow, the obliqueness of the threat. What
felt like the inevitability, perhaps. Unspecified, it became
generalized and permanent....If he had actually seen something
it would have been all right; his fear would have collapsed around
it and it wouldn't have been a problem." (The great suspense-horror
film producer Val Lewton had a similar notion and defied the
Stephen Kings of his day--Frankenstein and the rest of his Universal
brethren--by never showing the horrific subjects of his films.)
Though their tones are worlds apart, Ordinary Horror
reminds me of Donald Antrim's The Verificationist in its
magical suggestion that the laws that govern the ordinary world
are merely accepted rules of behavior that might very possibly
stop working if we simply stop accepting them. It's a mystical--even,
perhaps, a Gnostic--notion that offers both horror and transcendence.
Of course, Antrim's characters actually witness the world coming
unhinged, while Searcy's Mr. Delabano merely gets unnerving revelations
of its potential undoing. (Click here
to read WAG's review of The Verificationist.)
There's a feverish, heady fecundity to Searcy's prose that
makes it feel, at times, like a beautifully controlled short
story, and the fact that Searcy manages to sustain narrative
tension for the length of the novel is impressive.
Highly recommended.
--Charlie Onion
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