Reading the South
New Fiction by Regional Authors, February 2005
by Hal Jacobs
for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"The blues ain't nothing but a good man feeling bad," sings the bluesman Kenny Neal. In Cynthia Shearer's novel The Celestial Jukebox (Shoemaker & Hoard, $25), a lot of good people in a Mississippi Delta farming community have the blues.

The grouchy Chinese widower who runs the Celestial Grocery is hopelessly smitten with the Honduran woman who cooks for him. The newest resident of the community, a hardworking 15-year-old boy from Africa, falls in love with a pricey steel guitar in a shop window.

A white farmer misses his wife, who may or may not ever return home. In the meantime, he's keeping a protective eye on a young black female photographer who has camped out nearby to learn more about her family legacy.

Miles away, a middle-aged woman from the Memphis suburbs is feeling ever more lonely and estranged from her husband and children. When she meets a man who repairs vintage jukeboxes, she stops feeling so bad about herself. What's her connection to the farming community? The steel guitar that once belonged to her grandfather.

With a good blues song, it's not the message of suffering that you celebrate, but the victory of the human spirit over pain and loss. So it is with Shearer's second novel. (Her first, "The Wonder Book of the Air," won the 1996 prize for fiction from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.) In "The Celestial Jukebox," Shearer --- former curator of Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's home in Oxford, Miss. --- builds a story around her fictional community, the way its characters move together and apart, with the strength and generosity of a blues artist.

It's fitting that the vintage jukebox in the country store doesn't always play what customers want, but usually plays what they need.

* * *

Singlehood is the grim, funny subject of Marshall Boswell's first novel, Alternative Atlanta (Delacorte Press, $22). Gerald Brinkman, the single man in question, is a longhaired rock 'n' roll critic for an alternative newspaper in Atlanta. He's a grad school dropout who clings fondly to old habits (some illegal) while others in his circle of friends are taking the plunge toward respectability.

Gerald starts to question his life of genial shabbiness when three major events collide: His last bona fide girlfriend gets married, his eccentric father invites himself over for a long visit, and Atlanta hosts the 1996 Summer Olympics. Over the course of several weeks, Gerald begins to realize there's more to life than free CDs and catching local music acts at the Star Bar.

Boswell, who grew up in Tennessee and received his doctorate at Emory University, teaches at Rhodes College in Memphis. His debut collection of short stories, 2003's "Trouble With Girls," earned him scattered critical acclaim; this novel should earn him some more.

In "Alternative Atlanta," Boswell writes knowingly of the city's funkier side, from Little Five Points to Virginia-Highland. And Gerald is an excellent guide --- more of a sleepyhead than a deadhead, smart and jaded, but also brutally honest.

* * *

South Carolinian Ashley Warlick's powerful third novel, Seek the Living (Houghton Mifflin, $24) -- after 2000's The Summer After June and 1996's The Distance From the Heart of Things -- depicts the experiences of a passionate young woman named Joan, an archivist by day, who struggles to start a new family while dealing with the one she was born into. Joan's brother, Denny, poses a special challenge with his wild, small-town womanizing -- he's also started digging up bones at the cemetery where they once partied as teenagers.

As Joan begins to research the events that may have led to the buried remains, she uncovers details about a former lover who died under mysterious circumstances. Both brother and sister are complicated, sensual and volatile, and Warlick writes about them with a deep compassion and appreciation.

* * *

If crime doesn't pay, maybe the Babe will. That's the gist of Lee Irby's rollicking debut novel, 7,000 Clams (Doubleday, $23.95). Set in the 1920s, when baseball was the national pastime and drinking illegal booze was a close second, a small-time New Jersey bootlegger named Frank Hearn hightails it to Florida on the heels of the Sultan of Swat.

Hearn has picked up two things that lead him to believe his rotten luck is about to change: He has an IOU for $7,000 signed by Babe Ruth himself, and he's teamed up with a nightclub singer who is sure to get the attention of the debauched ballplayer, now that his legendary overindulgence has finally caught up with him.

It seems like easy pickings. But Hearn hadn't counted on the great Florida land boom, with each day bringing a new flock of con men, hustlers, flappers, gangsters and sociopaths to St. Petersburg.

Irby, a college history professor who lives in St. Pete, weaves their stories together to produce a crime caper that is both historically accurate and wildly entertaining.

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An edited version of these reviews appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, February 6, 2005.

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