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

In the 2003 collection of short stories Born on a Train, author John McManus showed a flair for depicting the lives of poor mountain people surviving on the mean fringes of society. Rather than portray his characters as amusing or deranged hillbillies, McManus -- who lives in Knoxville and Austin, Texas -- treated his social outcasts with lyricism and compassion.

In McManus' new novel, Bitter Milk (Picador, $13 paperback), 9-year-old protagonist Loren Garland finds himself trapped on all sides -- by family members, by pervasive ignorance and self-absorption, by isolation (the sun rises late and sets on the other side of the mountain), and even by his own body.

Loren suffers inside his obesity -- and he may not be alone. It seems as if one of his imaginary friends, Luther, may have taken up permanent residence in his girth. Or perhaps Luther is actually Loren's older twin, who died in the womb but lives on as his conscience. Maybe it's even a case of multiple personalities.

It's difficult to say for sure because the narrator of the novel is somewhat tricky and unreliable, being none other than Luther himself.

What makes this relationship so complicated is that Luther is a free spirit who wants to run through the dark woods while Loren wants to fill his mouth with food:

It would have been a great thing, the two of us, the mountains all around, the clouds trailing through the night sky. He opened the onion dip and set it on the table. Mother was home again, and she was snoring. Outside, the thunder was as low as her snores. We would have dodged between the hailstones. But I wasn't trying to be mean, taunting him with these thoughts. I just wanted someone to play with.

Loren is a scared child who finds himself alone in a world bereft of nourishment -- physical, emotional or spiritual. He can't stop eating, in an attempt to fill his emptiness.

After his mother abandons him -- exact information is scarce, but it seems she has left to undergo a long-awaited sex change -- Loren begins a journey into adolescence that is far more extreme than most.

Will he become like the people around him who have surrendered their memories and stopped making sense of the world in order to blend in with others? Or will he continue to rough out his own way and emerge, perhaps without the voice of Luther raging inside him, as an individual more fully alive than those around him?

Bitter Milk will challenge many readers with its continuous narrative (no chapter breaks) and tricky parsing of a 9-year-old's reality. But McManus has chosen not to offer up a glib version of a child's tortured quest for truth. Rather, he burrows deep inside his character to create a fresh, unforgettable portrait that is both firmly rooted in its Appalachian setting and universal in its appeal.

* * *

If it's time for afternoon showers and lazy summertime weekends, that means it's also time for Shannon Ravenel's annual short story collection.

New Stories From the South: The Year's Best, 2005 (Algonquin Books, $13.95 paperback) provides a choice sampler of writing culled from big monthly magazines and prestigious literary journals. As usual, editor Ravenel is a shrewd hostess who chooses her guests (stories) with an eye for being smart and entertaining, on top of providing a good mix of sophisticated humor, action and wistfulness.

You'll find such writers as Michael Parker, whose first-person narrator in "Hidden Meanings" is a college student pouring her heart into a term paper about a song by Southern soul singer Joe Tex: "Sometimes my life is like this song comes on the radio and I've forgot the words but then the chorus comes along and I only know the first like two words of every line."

Or Stephanie Soileau writing about how neighbors in Baton Rouge -- older Cajuns living next to a Sudanese family -- come together when a cow wanders into one of their back yards.

A highlight of the collection is Allan Gurganus' story "My Heart Is a Snake Farm." In a homage to the old Florida roadside attractions of the 1950s, a former grammar-school librarian falls for the charming "Jungle Jim" entrepreneur who builds his reptile exhibit and carnival shop across the highway from her closed-up motel. "When Buck laughed," Gurganus writes, "he gave off a smell like flint, ham, and 3-In-1 motor oil."

Pretty soon, the librarian is waiting in line with Buck's three ex-wives, who live in three identical trailers, all taking turns for a slice of his affection.

"Who wants to read a story where everything is perfect and nothing whatsoever happens?" Jill McCorkle writes in her charming introduction to this anthology. "Give me something that will break my heart. Make me ache. Make me laugh and weep simultaneously. Make me feel and care. That is what a story should do . . ."

An edited version of these reviews appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, July 10, 2005.

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