PrettyFakes

If you’ve made the mistake of putting yourself between me and a corner at a party anytime in the last few years, you’ve probably been subjected to my tirade about how troubling it is that no one has written a big, sprawling, social novel about the contemporary South (Tom Wolfe excepted), especially the Mississippi Delta, with its casinos and immigrants and agribusiness and what-not. “Where’s my novel about growing up Chinese in the Delta?” I’ll yell, maybe flecking the surface of your drink with a little spittle, and then, as you reflect that this must have been the reason Contessa kept offering you a lid for your margarita and why she looked at you with such sadness when you refused for the third and final time. You’re looking around for her now, desperate for an out, but she’s put on the red wig and is drinking tequila straight from the bottle, so there’s no salvation from that quarter. And as I lean over and begin to rasp in your ear about why we deserve a better Mississippi casino novel than Bob the Gambler...

You sit up! In your bed! Damp with sweat! Perhaps things are clinging to things, I don’t know, it’s better we not talk about it. “Phew,” you say, “It was all a horrible dream.” And then you turn to your sleeping partner to tell him or her about the horrible dream—and it’s me! And I sit up, and start explaining the adjustments to the Mink Snopes plot that Faulkner made between The Hamlet and The Mansion...

And you wake up again! Back at the party! You just dozed off during my discourse on Walker Percy’s nonfiction! Don’t worry, it happens a lot. Did you have that dream about the Snopes trilogy? Yeah, so what were you wearing? No, no, don’t tell me. You’re right. No.

Well, anyway—it turns out that someone has written the novel I’ve been so patiently waiting for, or at least a version of it. I was downright giddy when I stumbled across Cynthia Shearer’s 2005 opus The Celestial Jukebox at Lemuria a few months back, and I put it at the very top of my reading list. So, now that the novel exists—is it any good?

The real measure of a novel like this one—social on an epic scope—is whether it can sprawl without strecthing so thin that it begins to tear. To put it another way, is Shearer’s paint—or rather her skill as a painter—sufficient to cover a canvas so large without leaving any bare spots, or without forgetting when and where to go back and give attention to the shading and details that render flat figures three-dimensional? In this respect, The Celestial Jukebox is at least a partial success.

I find myself here thankful for Robert Altman, because “Altman-esque” is such a handy adjective for a book like this—overstuffed with characters, each with his or her own personal mania, but each intersecting with the other at strange but strangely natural points. The major players in the made-up town of Madagascar include Marie Abide, an “outsider artist”—I know, I know—who decorates the walls of an old plantation manor with verses born of a vision both apocalyptic and maternal; Angus Chien, who came to the Delta from Nanking as a child and who runs the Celestial Grocery; Boubacar, an African Muslim teen with a hunger to learn American music; Peregrine Smith-Jones, an African-American woman with family roots in the area who comes back to document “the South” but gets the South instead.

And others. Plenty of others. This novel is nothing if not rich in texture, and I won’t even attempt to capture it all here. Most of their stories are compelling, and Shearer manages her ensemble with dexterity. I was struck by the subtle, deft modulation of voice from chapter to chapter, in particular the crisp formality that makes its way into the narrative voice in sections dealing with Boubacar and his very proper uncles. The novel is least interesting, however, when it traipses into familiar territory: for instance, in several chapters that chronicle the trials of Raine, a harried Memphis housewife—complete with philandering husband and sullen children—as she begins a romance with a Dylan-loving jukebox repairman, and, one supposes, as she gets her groove back. If, in David Cohn’s oft-quoted definition, the Delta extends from the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis to Catfish Row in Vicksburg, then I can see the importance of including a character who at least could afford to stay at the Peabody. But Raine’s story feels pasted in from another book, and one we’ve all read, or at least had to see the movie on a first date.

There are other bum notes in the novel. I mean, there would have to be somewhere in the course of 430 pages. Salt-of-the-earth planter Dean Fondren is clearly going to be played by the rotting corpse of Gary Cooper, who will earn bad reviews for not being sufficiently stiff and noble, and Peregrine seems far too deserving of the various comeuppances she receives, mostly because she’s got one of them fancy educations. But my sense of things by the end of the book is that these problems are relatively few and largely forgivable. Shearer excels at observing the ways in which the South is imbricated in a network of global commerce that ties its residents, regardless of their claims to aw-shucksitude, to each other and to the world in myriad and complicated ways. One planter, proud to be listed in the S&P 500, gambles away his fortune in casinos built on former farmland and whose walls are now festooned with trompe l’oeil plantations. Raine visits a chain organic food store and reflects that the most expensive tomatoes in the store were the ones from right there in West Tennessee: “It seemed like a sign of something ominous and confusing, the way the pricing ensured that only the well-heeled got to eat locally grown tomatoes picked that same morning” (357).

And near the novel’s end, when characters begin straying into each others paths with such frequency that it seems like Shearer is tying her disparate strands together in a frustratingly tidy knot, when it seems like we are going to be subjected to a fantasy version of Southern “place” and “community,” the world intervenes again: this time in the form of the 9/11 attacks. Boubacar, who was being woven into the familiar fabric of the South despite his foreignness, finds himself an object of suspicion, a threatening presence even to those who embraced him, and must leave. It’s that attention to the South’s perpetual incompleteness, the way in which the fantasy of a closed and coherent South is persistently exposed as unsustainable, that really impresses me here.

If there’s a general point to be taken from this book, it’s that the Delta is a strange and more complicated place than is usually understood. Perhaps not a very controversial or new idea, but one, I would submit, that we’ve too often accepted without fully comprehending the true intricacies of the warp and woof in the weave of the fiber that makes up the Delta. Shearer has attempted to show us details that we have not seen before, to include more of the Delta than has previously been included in fiction and film, and to expose relationships that are all around us but often invisible.

Next up: Chris Bachelder’s US!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 25th, 2006 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Books, In Mississippi, In the Nation, In the South, Professor Fury. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.