Reading the South
New Fiction by Regional Authors, July 2002
by Hal Jacobs
for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

To see why The Oxford American magazine has developed such a devoted cult of readers in its 10-year existence, you need only browse through the pages of Best of the Oxford American (Hill Street Press, $16.95 paperback). This anthology of short stories, articles and poems is intelligent without being academic, quirky without being patronizing. To borrow a line from Roy Blount Jr. (a contributor), the Oxford American is for sophisticated readers who think of grits as food, not as a joke.

Contemporary short stories by Wendy Brenner, William Gay and others explore the hearts of Southern characters, especially those who are much more connected to the past than the future. The collection also features stories by William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston and Walker Percy, all of these works unpublished during their lifetimes.

The lead story by Brenner is told from the point of view of a newspaper photographer whose infatuation with a co-worker is heightened by his abuse of black-market protein powder.

Yesterday you smelled like detergent, having biked to work through the feeder bands of a tropical storm that was stalled just offshore in the Gulf. You clomped in like a draft horse, keys and change jingling, clean shirt steaming sweet ammonia and dripping all over the linoleum in the Xerox room.

The anthology's nonfiction section ranges far and wide. While Hal Crowther dismisses Erskine Caldwell as "a crank, an odd duck," Tony Earley chases down a sacred cow by suggesting that most bad Southern writing is a direct descendent of Eudora Welty's 1941 story, "Why I Live at the P.O.":

Welty's story smacks of a certain now-familiar sensibility, rife with caricature, overstated eccentricity, and broadly drawn humor, that has come to represent Southern writing and, through that representation, the South itself.

He goes on to explain why he believes Welty's story is one of the best ever written.

Larry Brown and musician Rosanne Cash share deeply moving experiences in their first-person stories. Brown writes about his days as a volunteer fireman in Mississippi.

We're up on a bridge above Highway 7 overpass and the two men ahead of us in the decapitated car have been nearly decapitated and I'm reluctant to walk up there and see them in their death and blood.

Cash describes a heartbreaking scene -- driving by a woman who has just learned that her husband, out for a walk, has been struck by a car and killed.

Through the closed car windows I could hear her screams: long, deep, circular cries, rising from the roots of her body, like a train whistle disappearing into an endless series of tunnels, like the wrenching Gaelic echoes that hang in the graveyard, like the hiss that escapes from the permanently shattered heart.

Publisher John Grisham, who saved the magazine in 1994 when its days seemed numbered, provides a quirky, somewhat irritable account of the "Faulkner thing," the assumption that every Southern writer labors in the shadow of Faulkner. Grisham makes it plain that he's under no such burden. "I'm a commercial writer who lives in the South," he writes. Yes, he does it for the money.

The Southern music section features a piece by Steve Martin on the banjo that includes these opening lines: "The four-string banjo has four strings. The five-string banjo has five." It's the five-string banjo that Martin writes about with a fussiness bordering on obsession that may or may not surprise readers.

It requires no stretch of the imagination to see the Oxford American in a class with The New Yorker. Under a new ownership arrangement that may be finalized soon, the Oxford American's offices will move from Oxford, Miss., to Little Rock, Ark. Details about the magazine's future are unclear, but perhaps this anthology will help lure more readers who are willing to support good writing.

In Nancy Lemann's Malaise (Scribner, $23), a New York journalist in a midcareer slump becomes infatuated with an old, fabulously wealthy Englishman based in Hollywood.

Fleming Ford and Mr. Lieberman, a British mogul of "towering grace and stern glamour," have more in common than charm, wit and love for Old World style. His recently deceased wife and Fleming once shared a friendship in New York owing to their family connections to the "same crumbling but ornate old social town on the Alabama coast, Fort Defiance. It was rather Proustian there, with aging figures of distinction or pretention, depending on how you looked at it, and a taste for debauchery."

With Lieberman and his fortune beckoning, Ford has plenty to feel giddy and slightly depressed about. There's her loyalty to her geologist husband and two children. And her relocation to a southern California town with its perfect weather and perfectly insipid culture. And the fact that she's irresistibly drawn to reading books about World War I, which probably means she's pregnant again.

The question of her future looms large: Will her fondness for dilapidated cities -- and men -- win out over her duties as wife, mother and journalist?

Lemann is the author of three previous novels: "Lives of the Saints," "The Fiery Pantheon" and "Sportsman's Paradise." A native of New Orleans, she lives in San Diego.

In Tony Walters' Burden (St. Martin's Press, $23.95), a young man named Burden delivers more than groceries to several lonely housewives in his small town. But sex isn't all Burden is looking for. Ever since the violent death of his beloved cousin, he wants somebody to end it for him. His first choice? One of the cuckolded husbands who he perversely hopes will catch him between the sheets.

Walters' debut novel is at its most energetic and lyrical when describing the bedroom romps between Burden and his older, lustier partners. However, when Burden sinks into mournful contemplation of his cousin's murder and his own responsibility, the novel grows lethargic under the heavy weight of Southern gothic.

Walters lives in Cocoa, Fla.

Stephen Doster's debut novel, Lord Baltimore (John F. Blair, $22.95), hearkens back to novels in which young men searched for adventure, suffered fantastic trials, encountered worldly mentors, outwitted their enemies and emerged with good names and fortunes. In this case, the young hero is a St. Simons country-club slacker who is dumped by his father near the Georgia barrier islands. Ensworth must either make the solo journey to Savannah or face immediate disinheritance.

In keeping with the genre, the bland pre-college youth does what he's told, and suffers plenty of indignities, especially the know-it-all ramblings of a pedantic beachcomber type named Lord Baltimore. Fortunately, the action takes place on the scenic Gullah island of Zapala, where a little fantasy and old-fashioned rambling goes a long way.

Doster grew up on St. Simons Island and lives in Nashville.

Also check out these new novels by regional writers:

The Wedding Dress by Virginia Ellis (Ballantine, $21.95). Two sisters decide to sew a wedding gown for their youngest sibling in the post-Civil War South.

Wild Blue Yonder by William Price Fox (Crane Hill, $24.95). A 16-year-old South Carolinian enrolls in the Air Force during World War II to escape troubles at home. Not surprisingly, he finds more troubles awaiting him in and out of uniform.

Where the River Bends by Richard Haddaway (Southern Methodist University Press, $22.50). Multi-generational story of a Texan oil family cursed by a father's, then a son's, alcoholism and despair.

An edited version of these reviews appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, July 28, 2002