A few days ago I finished the first of my summer reading books, Jack Butler’s 1993 novel Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock. I’ve started this book probably half a dozen times over the last five or six years, only to put it aside when more pressing concerns arose; at 655 pages, you can see where I might have felt a little daunted. But I kept coming back to it because I wanted to see if it delivered on the promise of its opening line:
Howdy, I’m the Holy Ghost. Talk about your omniscient narrators.
And I’m glad to say that it mostly does. Walker Percy once wrote that American novels tend to be about everything, and Little Rock is definitely an American novel in that vein. This is a novel with everything, don’t hold the kitchen sink, heck buy two and we’ll return the one we don’t like. It’s the sort of novel that includes full-page mock-ups of newspaper obituaries and letters-to-the-editor pages (including a letter from the Holy Ghost) and Peanuts strips and stream-of-consciousness passages laid out like a flow chart and a scene in which the author appears as a character but it’s not annoying or pretentious. Set in Arkansas (duh) in the early 1980s, it chronicles the adventures of Charles Morrison, a wealthy, liberal lawyer, his wife Lianne, a former pageant queen and TV anchor, their various friends and members of Charles’ law firm, and their enemies—a crooked top cop and his gang of thugs.
Except. Except except except. After one of those thugs is finally busted for committing a hearbreaking crime, Butler—or rather the Holy Ghost, and against His will to boot—gives us a peek inside that thug’s head, and it’s so beautiful and touching that you think for ten pages or so that maybe he’s been the hero of the book all along. In fact, that may be Butler’s greatest strength as a writer—a kind of tragic grace, a hyperactive empathy that goes beyond merely repeating the tired old shibboleth about life and shades of gray and instead forces you into the skins of those whom you’ve found the most repugnant and revolting, holds their eyes wide open with toothpicks and makes you look through them until the differences upon which you’ve based your whole identity and worldview don’t dissolve, exactly—not for Butler the tepid finger-food book-club conclusions of we’re-all-the-same-under-the-skin—but rather collapse inward like a black hole, inexorably sucking all the matter in the world into you, no matter how desperately you fear contact with all this other junk you hold yourself higher than, denying you the safe refuges of scorn and disdain in which to hunker down and protect yourself, or your Self. Reading Butler is like seeing the corners of the vision that Mrs. Turpin receives at the end of Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation”: a crowd of folks marching to heaven as not just their differences but even their virtues burn away. Except Butler writes way more sex scenes than O’Connor. Way, way more.
Another of the reasons I like this novel so much is because of its setting, time-wise; a lot of even very contemporary Southern fiction still tends to be set in the 1950s or 1960s, during the Civil Rights movement. That’s understandable—there are clear moral lines to muddy, built-in drama to exploit, stories that still need telling. But on the other hand, you know, enough—the South has gotten even more complicated since then, and are we really going to have to start teaching that stately doorstop A Man in Full—as thick as a phone book and with twice as many characters—just so we can have a text that deals with the South and global capitalism and urbanization and Republicans and such? So I love that Little Rock is set in the 80s, and devotes long passages to a court battle over creation science being taught in schools—timely, yes?—and the attempted assassination of Reagan. And Butler, as the son of a Baptist minister and a former student of Mississippi College, absolutely nails a brand of Southern-fried faux-piety that has probably rankled all of us at some point. And the whole thing is funny as hell.
As much as I liked Little Rock, though, Jujitsu for Christ may still be my favorite of his novels: the story of a born-again karate expert who befriends an African American family in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi. I’m working on an essay on J4C now, so I won’t go into a lot of detail about it except to say that it may be my favorite novel of all time. Here are a couple of excerpts from Butler’s description of a Mississippi summer, though, that should please you Jacksonians:
Ten o’clock you can’t believe the hammer blows of wavering heat. You’ve had your last rational thought of the day. It makes the headlines believable, the way everything shimmers unreal. Your mind shakes like the Shadrach air. The last scrap of fog is gone, partial pressure of water vapor is way down as the ambient heat skyrockets. The blacktop pools with liquid asphalt, barefoot children trying to skip across the store for a Nehi (their folks make them do it to kill the hookworms burrowing in their feet). The children get stuck and squeal. Squeals turn to screams, but the sound is far a way and tinny, sound doesn’t carry in this heat, or maybe your ears have melted. The children char, collapse on themselves, subsumed in the asphalt. All winter their parents will drive over their trapped bones. By January the old folks’ brains will have cooled off enough to wonder what happened to the kids.…
A good wet summer day is like taking a shotgun and making your granddaddy drink two quarts of Early Times in quick succession and then making him put on his long wool underwear and run around the house till he sweats it all out and them making him sleep in the underwear for three straight days without letting him get up to go to the bathroom so he just has to leak right there in his long-johns, and then you make him take em off and you take em out in the yard and wet em down good with the hose with the water that is still running hot from laying there in the hose in the sun. Then you take em and wrap em around your face. Suck in a good lungful.
…
Something has made your world, and not particularly with you in mind.
Yeah. God bless Jack Butler.
i’m buying jujitsu for christ this weekend.
thanks for the heads up.
You won’t regret it! It is out of print, though, but you should be able to find one used around Jackson. And Lemuria has some high-dollar first editions, I think.
Prof., another entry that makes me hungry to know more and to READ! It wasn’t nearly as hot as that (grody + fabulous) passage above today in the small south Mississippi town I was in, but after five minutes of standing in an unairconditioned store sifting through chipped and battered 78s (all folk—meh) I was striped up the back with sweat, both shirtsleeves damp from rubbing my face on them.
Contessa’s folks gave us their old turntable, which plays 78s, but I’ve resisted adding another geeky collecting obsession to my repertoire. Still, it’s tempting, although I feel like I’d need to grow a mustache.
I just need to point out the fact that, last night, I literally bought two kitchen sinks. Seriously.
Unfortunately, a 600+ page novel that won’t translate into at least 30 pages of dissertation—no matter how interesting that novel might be—ain’t on my horizon.
Well—it does mention communists a lot. I’m sure you could write a lengthy footnote about it, at least.
[...] e inches shorter by the time the dead finishes flaking from the top of my head. I did read Jack Butler’s Nightshade, his sci-fi novel about a vampire on Mars, which was better than any novel about a v [...]
[...] e thicket of autobiographical significance. And I know I’ve quoted Walker Percy here before on how American novels tend to be about everything, but it’s worth bringing up again–these are b [...]
[...] ttle Rock; and Dreamer–a CIA thriller), and a cookbook. I posted about Jack Butler last summer, when I had just finished reading Living in Little Rock–a delight–and I ruminated some on J [...]
[...] rits (or flaws, as some may want to argue). I’ve written about Butler a couple of times before, and so my affection for his work is no secret. I first heard about Jujitsu at a meeting of the Mississippi [...]
[...] a history by Mark Waid published in Secret Origins #45, 1989. Previous posts discussed the Summer Passage in Jujitsu, the start of the PF book club featuring Jujitsu for Christ, and a kickoff of the discus [...]
[...] king about it. We’ll do it again. Previous entries: –Prof. Fury examines the Summer Passage in Jujitsu for Christ –Prof. Fury compares Jack Butler to a cross between “Thomas Pyncho [...]