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

In Olympia Vernon's Eden (Grove Press, $23), the rural countryside of Pyke County, Miss., resembles a scorched paradise -- an Eden after the fall, after the snake has brought darkness, disease and decay into the world. This is a primitive world where a young girl watches her grandmother chop off her father's arm with an ax and then feed the arm to the hog. Why? Because her daddy used that arm to touch another woman -- because "he smelled like thievery."

In this remote land, people either put their trust in the white-skinned, blue-eyed Jesus on the cross or fear the wrath of the dark-skinned, gold-toothed Jesus who owns the pool hall on Factory Road.

Fortunately, a small bit of Eden remains tucked away in the heart of 14-year-old Mattie, the novel's African-American narrator who grasps at language to express herself as if her survival depended on it. She practices in private, so she is free to invent and assemble, to be as profane and daring as she pleases. To others, she is all "yes, ma'am" and "no matter." Inside her head, she uses words to transform her mundane, passive existence into something rich and vibrant:

Daddy's arm: the radius of a complete body, the portion of a man that every man needed, his trouble, a six-sided dice throw against the wall, an acoustic guitar's whine, half his life. Grandma dumped it into the trough. I was sure of it.

Mattie loves encyclopedias -- her ballast in a world of ignorance -- but hates history. She rips the pages about Adolf Hitler out of her books. There's already too much violence in her world.

Over the course of the novel, Mattie is sent by her mother to care for her dying aunt, who is wasting away with breast cancer. Unlike Mattie's churchgoing mother, Aunt Pip has sinned happily and often with married men, including Mattie's father. The experience of caring for her gives Mattie an intimacy with dying and a woman's inner strength that ultimately gives her more courage to realize her potential.

Sensual and disturbing, Vernon's debut novel has an intensity and lyricism that makes you forgive the occasional misstep, when you stop and wonder who's being a little stilted or cliched, the author or the 14-year-old narrator? Would Mattie really think that her teacher's hair was "dyed the color of a natural disaster"? Or that a young man "was dark like a nightmare in the middle of the night that no one could pull herself out of"?

Despite little slips, the novel creates an unforgettable voice. Vernon writes with a scary, deep knowledge of a very primitive place.

The author grew up in a small town near the state line of Mississippi and Louisiana.

***

Also check out these new novels by regional writers:

John Ed Bradley's Restoration (Doubleday, $24.95). In Bradley's action-romance novel set in the colorful world of folk art collecting, a jaded ex-journalist is attracted to a beautiful, mysterious art restorer. Bradley must know what he's writing about: He lives in the Big Easy, where he collects 19th- and 20th-century works by New Orleans artists.

Opening lines: The buses have not yet begun to arrive: the garden club ladies in sandals and straw hats, the schoolchildren on field trips, the pale, weary northerners grousing about the heat. The least pleasant of the museum's visitors are the amateur painters from the local art academies. They shuffle from room to room dismissing the silence with cruel laughter and snorts of disapproval. They know everything.

***

Tim Dorsey's The Stingray Shuffle (William Morrow, $24.95). Dorsey's depraved Florida characters resemble the Stooges on PCP in this fifth novel of nonstop action and hijinks.

Opening lines: Uh-oh. Lenny slipped me LSD. That can be the only explanation. It's been nonstop hallucinations. Which normally I don't mind, but you wouldn't believe how it complicates trying to cross U.S. 1 against heavy traffic. I must have stepped off the curb and headed back about fifty times now. I think I'm in the Florida Keys.

***

Elliott Mackle's It Takes Two (Alyson Books, $13.95 paperback). In his debut novel, Mackle, a former restaurant critic for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, tackles a sexy "whydunnit" set in 1949 Fort Myers, Fla. When hotel manager Dan Ewing and police detective Bud Wright aren't busy keeping their jobs, they're getting busy with each other and keeping the wraps on their intimate relationship in this small Southern town.

Opening lines: "Why did the Klan march on a Saturday night?" I asked my friend the Lee County detective. "And why the hell did you have to go watch the bastards do it -- and leave me high and dry?" I was trying to keep my voice down. But I was pissed. That February weekend in 1949 was my first real break since Christmas. I'd spent most of Saturday night by myself on a lumpy couch in the detective's rented room. He hadn't come home until long after I sank into shallow, jittery sleep.

An edited version of these reviews appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, Feb. 23, 2003.

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