Who cares?

His novels are engaging, readable, and present us with a version of the South that is rapidly disappearing.  Burke’s primary interest is the Cajun South, the bayou South, the French-speaking South that is rapidly being subsumed by larger interests.  Yes, he trafficks heavily in nostalgia for a long-gone cane-farming Cajun world, but ultimately that is part of his charm.  His novels are mysteries and feature characters who are knowable and accessible.  Their covers are cheap, yes, and appeal to airport travelers looking for a few hours’ entertainment.  This is a shame, and I do not blame him for it.  My time in the publishing industry taught me just how little control authors have over the way their work is marketed, and I imagine that somewhere on the bayou is a man who deeply resents the packaging his work has been given.

I first came across his work while working for his publishing company and have enjoyed it ever since.  His work is woefully packaged  as glossy, embossed-cover airport bullshit, but it’s so much better.  He is, despite the packaging, no Dean Koontz and I am immeasurably thankful for that.  Burke engages his readers in intellectual gamesmanship, daring them to penetrate not only the mystery at the heart of the novel itself, but the complex social structures that surround his bayou culture and make it viable as a novel setting.

So what does it tell us about the South?  Not very much that we didn’t know already.  Unlike inferior novelists, Burke does not rely on the South as a dramatic foil, nor does he use it to advance his plot when poor writing fails him.  Instead, he creates a swirling bayou world that is both engrossing and utterly believable.  Much more than airport fare, Burke’s work is as engaging as it is accessible.  Ignore the cheap book jackets and enjoy the books themselves.

In The Half-Mammals of Dixie, Singleton unpacks the lives of Forty-Five’s sparse population in short, comic sketches.   Common themes here are childhood friendship, alcoholism, and the uniquely small town phenomenon of the cheating spouse that everyone is aware of but the cuckold himself.

More than anything, The Half-Mammals of Dixie is funny.  It will make you laugh frequently and occasionally aloud.  But, like jokes delivered in rapid succession, they can become muddled if read all in one sitting.  Each story, while related to the other pieces in varying degrees, works as a stand-alone narrative that doesn’t rely on the rest of the collection for buttressing, and that may be Half-Mammal’s greatest strength — pull if off your shelf at random and read a story to lighten a bleak mood.  I frequently ask my girlfriend to read them to me when cooking, doing taxes, etc.  It’s really unbeatable for that sort of thing.

While Singleton ultimately lacks the sophisticated prose styling of later Rash (buy yourself a copy of One Foot in Eden or, even better, Serena) or Berry’s inimitable sense of place, his work succeeds in providing sharp comic sketches of rural life with taut prose and impeccable narrative pacing.  But perhaps above all, there is no hint of corn-pone in Half-Mammals.  Singleton manages to keep the stories recognizable, relatable, and hilarious without once going for the low-brow “dumb cracker” joke.  There is not one single dead mule.  The humor is deft and original, and that alone warrants a read.

Sure, it’s not Faulkner.  But nothing is.

See also: George Singleton interviewed on IndieBound

• Oxford American dedicates some space to some particularly wonderful Southern cheese.  Sweet Home Farm in Elberta, Alabama is a particular favorite of our very own Arts Editor, Brannon.  She grew up just miles away in Daphne, but has yet to share any with me.

• I had a birthday recently (28 — keeping 30 steadily at bay), and a friend, knowing my predilection for that venerable Southern cocktail sent me this, along with an excellent bottle of bourbon.  I look forward to enjoying it this weekend.  Now, if only I could find a poem about the Old Fashioned (I enjoy mine with rye, however — is that heresy?)

Now, I’ve made it sound like some ominous, doom-saying and finger-wagging slog that tolls the death knell for the rural South.  That’s far from the truth.  The Accountant is, at its core, a comedy.  Hell, it’s hilarious.  But as the old song goes, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.  The rural, small farming South is losing its once firm grip on its traditions, and has only itself to blame.  This very problem is embodied in the O’Dell brothers, one a strict traditionalist and fledgling farmer, the other a more progressive but not unsympathetic rationalist who seems to hold an ambiguous job in town.  Their family farm is in danger of falling into bankruptcy, and the accountant sees only one very macabre solution to its financial woes.

Ray McKinnon (you may know him from Deadwood or O Brother!) wrote, directed, and starred in what would win the Oscar for Best Live Action Short in 2002.  With his wife, Lisa Blount, Ray runs Ginny Mule Pictures, an entity about which there is frustratingly little information available online.  Other work by the same production team has been less successful — Chrystal, a dreary but highly watchable drama (worth seeing if only for Lisa Blount’s singing) and the recent and decidedly less ambitious Randy and the Mob – but a new film, That Evening Sun, based on a William Gay short story, seems promising.

The Accountant is a comedy.  It’s also exceptionally tragic.  The characters (there are only 3 in the entire film) are forced to watch their culture crumble around them and are powerless to respond, save the palpable but impotent rage that permeates the entire film.  It’s as maddening as it is hilarious.

Ron Rash’s Chemistry and Other Stories isn’t new.  It’s a couple of years old, but it wears them well.  Rash is a professsor of Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University, and his title should give you some indication of his subject matter.  He is a prolific writer of poetry (poetry, of course, is always dicey and never having read it, can’t comment either way) and fiction.  You might know the name from more successful novels like Saints at the River and The World Made Straight.

The short form style of Chemistry gives Rash the chance to explore a broader Appalachia and populate it with figures who are equal parts tragic, exuberant, and  punishingly honest.  The titular story depicts a family struggling with a father’s terminal illness and his patiently abiding interest in a remote, evangelical church.  Other gems like “Speckled Trout,” (winner of the 2005 O. Henry prize) “The Projectionist’s Wife” and the seemingly out-of-place “Honesty” are well worth the effort.  Rash works in an Appalachia whose traditions and struggles aren’t dying or dead but are very much alive, despite the soft fatalism of his oeuvre.

Chemistry is also exceptional in the way it deftly avoids cliche, which the Appalachians are particularly full of.  Martin Amis once said a writer’s primary work is to do battle with cliche, and Rash has succeeded where scores have failed.  Though the characters are familiar — old men gossip about a legendary fish, an abusive husband consoles his recently-assaulted wife — they aren’t tired, trite, or predictable.  His characters share a sort of fatalistic resignation, and it may be just that soft note of defeat that resonates so familiarly with those of us who know Appalachia intimately.

When I was a child, my grandfather sang me odd, halting songs, seemingly atonal and operating within a structure I could scarcely remember, let alone master. Lyrically they were very simple and very much about the Crucifixion and its attendant imagery.  The lyrics were preceded by syllables more akin to shouts than notes, and though I had no idea what he was trying to teach me, I was completely fascinated by the performance.

He called it “Fa So La,” so named for the musical syllables sang before the lyrics began.  This was done so that members of the congregation could get an idea of the melody before the lyrics began on the second time through.  Later, I learned that this was called “Shape Note Singing” or, more commonly, “Sacred Harp,” so named for the song book in which the music was found (my mother has my grandfather’s tattered copy, an heirloom from the late 1880s — multiple attempts to smuggle it out of the house during holiday visits have failed).

Sacred Harp, such as it is, is a dying thing.  Even when my grandfather was a child in the 1920s, it was falling out of fashion, in favor of more structured congregational singing.  It was viewed as backward and rustic by many, even crude and unsavory by others.  What it ultimately was was an utterly unique form of music, complete with a historical pedigree dating back to the 17th century and producing a wall of wailing, shack-shaking noise that still reverberates through the piney North Alabama foothills where I was born.

Anthropological context aside, Sacred Harp, when performed correctly, is a wonder to behold.  Matt and Erica Hinton, Georgia natives and Emory grads, have produced what is easily the definitive documentary on the subject.  Awake, My Soul! is marvelous, and it makes me indescribably homesick.  The trailer is something to behold, but the music itself can’t be missed.  Once on the film’s website, the song “Idumea” will begin to play automatically, and they could hardly have chosen a better introduction to the art form.

What’s ultimately reflected in Awake, My Soul! is both defiance and deference.  At best, mainstream America (what few who are aware) will look at these singers as a curiosity; at worst, they will be painted broadly as rustics and unschooled zealots tucked away in remote corners of the South.  They are accustomed to both and are bothered by neither.  They venerate their dying art where they may, and I suspect you are welcome to join.

The enemy of every Southern historian is sentimentality.  It and its louche cousin, romanticism, are seductive enough to derail any attempt at actual scholarship.  Few undertake to tell some fragment of the Southern narrative without being suckered in by marauding Union cavalrymen or the tale of some poor-but-proud widow scratching an existence from a rocky plot, etc, etc.  Such is the price of picking around the collapsing columns of porticoes and underneath sharecroppers’ shacks.

But there are rare successes. 

Silent in the Land, Chip Cooper’s collection of photographs documenting the  antebellum architecture of Alabama is as intimidating as it is delightful.  Visually, the book is a pleasure to behold.  The work is exceptionally well done, the colors are rich and the houses provoke a visceral reaction that may range from awe at the architectural splendor to distaste (I recognize the understatement) for the socio-economic conditions that made their construction and the class who built them possible.

Cooper, Director of Photography at the University of Alabama, along with architectural interpretations by Robert Gamble and essays by Harry Knopke, documents the ruins of a class and of a lifestyle with unabashed honesty.  The homes, some well maintained, others in lamentable states of delapidation, reflect either nostalgia or revulsion in the reader.  It’s precisely that semiotic weight that Silent in the Land evokes so masterfully.  Just don’t call it a coffee table book.