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Books
The usual Southern suspects
By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published July 9, 2006
In the hands of its masters, Southern gothic fiction offers many delights: bizarrely original characters, wickedly surprising plots, outrageous humor and wise insight into the human condition. Faulkner, O'Connor, Welty, Crews, Nordan: They can make us weep with laughter one moment and chill us the next, and for them the South is both a specific place, flawed but dearly beloved, and a universal canvas. On the other hand, there are few things more annoying (particularly if you've lived in the South) than the lite version of Southern fiction - call it instant grits lit. No deeper than a pond in dry season, populated with relentlessly whimsical stereotypes and plotted to tick randomly between grotesque disaster and broad humor, it's enough to make you wish Flannery's peacocks had pecked the author away from the keyboard before the book got written. Mark Childress has won praise for several of his earlier novels set in the South (notably the bloody Crazy in Alabama, which features a severed head in a Tupperware container); he has also written several young adult books. Maybe that's why his new novel, One Mississippi, seems to wobble between afterschool-special sentimentality and bursts of cartoon violence, without ever making its characters solid enough to seem real. One Mississippi is a coming-of-age story, set in the early 1970s in Minor, Miss., where its narrator, Daniel Musgrove, lands with his peripatetic family just in time for his junior year of high school. Daniel's teenage drama about moving subsides quickly when he finds a friend. ("All you really need is one.") Tim Cousins is a lanky loner, a wise-ass whose philosophy is "Everything is funny." The boys endure the usual high school humiliations, bonding in band class and watching The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour on TV. The plot promises to get under way when Daniel and Tim, dressed in sky-blue tuxedoes and displaying virtually no social skills, take the plain but sweet Frillinger sisters to the prom. It's the first prom since the school's racial integration, and the evening's first sensation is the election of smart, beautiful, black Arnita Beecham as prom queen. The second sensation is an accident later that night that leaves Arnita in a coma. Daniel, convinced he is responsible, devotes himself to Arnita's family, although he goes along with Tim in letting the blame for the accident fall on a football player who had bullied them. When Arnita comes out of the coma, Daniel falls madly in love with her - despite the minor complication that she now believes she is a white girl named Linda. But after that intriguing beginning, the plot collapses into loosely connected episodes that seem more like a series of short stories with wildly varied tones. Daniel and Tim perform in a hilariously bad church musical called Christ! They go to a Sonny and Cher concert and sneak into Cher's dressing room. Daniel's father blows up the family home. Such disorienting mood swings aren't the only problem with One Mississippi, although they do make its intensely violent conclusion jarring rather than credible. Despite its setting, One Mississippi doesn't have much fresh to say about the South. Instead, it relies on stock Southern lit character types. Female schoolteachers have Blanche Dubois-style breakdowns for no particular reason; every black person is wise and stoic; Daniel even has a crazy great-uncle who has second sight. The only thing missing is a three-legged pit bull. Well, that and some heart to make the reader care about the whole bunch. Colette Bancroft is a Times staff writer.
[Last modified July 7, 2006, 11:35:18]
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