Reading the South
New Fiction by Regional Authors, October 2003
by Hal Jacobs
for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A middle-aged art professor in Biloxi throws himself into the lives of his 20-something students in Frederick Barthelme's Elroy Nights (Counterpoint, $24). During his long tenure at Dry River University, Elroy has always kept his distance from students, quietly envying their futures and secretly lusting after the young women. But he suddenly shifts gears when he and his wife decide to live separately.

Clare and I were still together, fond of each other, devoted. The idea of living apart was simply a formalizing of the distance at which we preferred to be, the comfortable distance.

Elroy moves out of their house overlooking the bay into a beachside condominium complex called Windswept, a name that also describes his new life.

Almost, he becomes known as "Old Guy," the cool teacher who hangs out with students to all hours, drinks with them, and, yes, sleeps with the most alluring. That his new friend is also his stepdaughter's roommate adds a new edge to his transformation. So does the suicide of his most promising student.

In his understated way, Barthelme captures the awe that Elroy feels toward these young people, and the occasional surprise he registers when he realizes that though he thinks and behaves like them, he no longer physically resembles them.

And with its mix of bayside marshes, glitzy casinos and seedy charm, Biloxi provides a perfect setting for Elroy's midlife ramblings.

Barthelme is the author of 12 books of fiction and directs the writing program at the University of Southern Mississippi.

***

Wayne Greenhaw's The Spider's Web (River City Publishing, $23.95) depicts the bumpy, unsettling journey of an Alabama teenager growing into manhood in the 1950s.

In the opening novella, 14-year-old Thomas Morgan Reed leaves his childhood at the door when he enters a children's hospital in Birmingham to undergo treatment for a curved spine.

While awaiting a series of operations that will keep him confined to the clinic for several months, he is drawn into the lives of other children who suffer far more than he does. In this world, the grotesque becomes commonplace. A tormented boy in a wheelchair reads romantic novels to a girl trapped in an iron lung. Later, when Thomas lies immobile in a plaster body cast, she becomes the object of his fantasies.

Gradually, his painful and lonely ordeal gives him a deeper perspective that will serve him well. As he watches a spider spinning a web on the ceiling over his bed, he realizes, "She didn't give one iota of thought to my agony." The moment marks his step into manhood: The realization that he is alone in this world, which is cause for neither self-pity or defeat.

The other stories in this collection (many originally published in literary quarterlies) deal with Robert's growing independence from his family, the treachery that awaits the unsuspecting, and the easy intimacy between sex and violence. Greenhaw spins out each story with a graceful ease and compassion for his characters. Taken together, the stories bear out the quotation from Nabokov in the front pages: "Life is beautiful. Life is sad."

Greenhaw is the author of four novels and lives in Montgomery.

***

In Michael Morris's Slow Way Home (HarperSanFrancisco, $22.95), a young boy from North Carolina is torn between loyalty to his neglectful mother and longing for kind adults. Brandon is a smart, observant 8-year-old when we first meet him in 1971, but he suffers mightily at the hands of his mother and her boyfriends. His fortunes improve, however, when she drops him off at her parent's farm on her way to chasing some pipe dream in Canada.

Under his grandparents' roof, Brandon starts to enjoy a normal childhood. The farm is a safe haven for him and he relaxes enough to let "the house's perfume of pine needles, mothballs and grease seep" seep into his system. You can almost hear the rumble of thunder on the day he catches a glimpse of his mother's old car.

Later, faced with court order to return the boy to his mother, the grandparents drive away with him instead.

In a little trailer park in the Florida panhandle, under assumed names, this untraditional family puts down roots. Morris captures the adventure from the boy's eyes, the feeling of discovery as well as the fear of saying the wrong word and getting caught. Eventually, the past catches up with Brandon and his rescuers, creating even more uncertainty in his future.

Morris, a fifth-generation native of rural northern Florida, lives in Alabama. His first novel was last year's "A Place Called Wiregrass."

An edited version of these reviews appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, Oct. 19, 2003.

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