A Turn in the South
Naipaul, V. S.
A TURN IN THE SOUTH V. S. Naipaul/Alfred A. Knopf/307 pp. $18.95 Dave Shiflett S. Naipaul is a man without . roots, a wanderer on a spinning planet, not the kind of guy you'd find sitting on a...
...Their lives are battlegrounds of hope and despair, longing and dread, paradise and hellfire...
...It might have been the woman Baptist preacher who kept figurines of a black Jesus and THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 45 a white Jesus, she not wishing to lose a convert on a technicality...
...Naipaul wonders...
...They're worrying about where the next sack of potatoes is coming from...
...In one corner was Mr...
...Naipaul seems to be short of...
...Or maybe timing had something to do with it...
...He finds some relief among the prisoners of hope...
...And even if he doesn't believe their ideas, there's no arguing that they are more worthy of the human mind than the modern preoccupation with your gonads, my gonads, and sports cars...
...All of which made for an interesting situation, one in which the potential for conflict between author and subject was great...
...Cheaper than you and I. And they're not skinny...
...But they can live on a hundred dollars a week...
...life following death...
...They're Scotch-Irish in origin...
...He met plenty of people straight out of central casting...
...He plans, he says, to complete one more book and then give up writing...
...Over the course of his life he has found much to dislike in the world: its pettiness and hatred have driven a stake very close to his heart...
...These indictments, generally written upwind of Harlem, are in keeping with the usual approach to the South: slice up the current sinners, then strafe the graveyard...
...This had the makings of another "Sahara of the Bozart...
...It just isn't the biggest one...
...But there's an upscale redneck, and he's going to want it cleaned up...
...Those readers who have a feeling for Mr...
...This is not, he found, an idiot, feel-good religion...
...Something got to Mr...
...a fund will provide the whiskey with which the living will toast the dead...
...instead, he saw it as his stage and had even prepared a skit to be performed after his death...
...you can see him crack a smile and lick the lead of his pencil...
...Some of them are big and fat...
...Charleston was a resort town...
...No account as they are, however, they are not petty, and what's more, even if there's a tear on their cheek, there's also a grin on their face because they figure it'll come out fine in the end...
...46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989...
...Naipaul had heard there were people in the South who lived this way and went there for five months to see for himself...
...So along come the Southrons, the lowliest of whom is animated by the grandest of ideas: order out of chaos...
...Like most people, he wanted to know something more about the racial situation, perhaps especially because he comes from a place where slavery also existed...
...love answering hatred...
...In this case, Mr...
...and they had, bizarrely, also appeared in couples...
...But it didn't turn out that way...
...18.95 Dave Shiflett S. Naipaul is a man without . roots, a wanderer on a spinning planet, not the kind of guy you'd find sitting on a front porch whittling ducks...
...And so that world becomes more familiar...
...But his interest in race soon faded, not because race is a minor part of Southern life...
...He is, however, interested in the idea of home—a place where you fight your fight with life on the same dusty floorboards, where your family chants the Beatitudes around your deathbed...
...Where do they come from, Mr...
...That's going to be a big deal...
...Old Mama, she's gonna wear designer jeans and they're gonna go to Shoney's to eat once every three weeks...
...Which is to say they might spend Dave Shiflett is a writer living in Virginia...
...Naipaul liked that spirit and sensed a bigger story...
...They'll love it...
...Naipaul discovered, the old newspaperman didn't really worship nature...
...He's going to have an eight-to-five job...
...Such a spirit was not confined to the newspaperman, and over the course of his journey Mr...
...Naipaul discovered what is probably the most widespread characteristic of Southerners: they are often quite close to the land—even tied to it—but they are also strangers to the earth...
...Naipaul's contribution is to look deeper into the soul of the South...
...They had appeared there, in the hotel, in gay holiday clothes that were on them doubly and trebly exaggerated...
...Mr...
...Naipaul, a lapsed Hindu, a sophisticated world traveler, a man not known to put any stock in the metaphysical explanation...
...But he later sums up the carbohydrate situation with considerable skill: Ever since the Charleston hotel (and especially the busy business people in Atlanta) I had been aware of very fat people, people who had risen (like dough) to special spheres of obesity...
...Naipaul heard people attribute their good works to a religious obligation...
...Naipaul, heart and pencil racing, also asks about redneck women...
...Is Shoney's preferable to McDonald's...
...Naipaul is a tired man...
...What am I saying...
...His tombstone will read "Have One On Jack...
...They're all big and fat...
...Many times Mr...
...Naipaul's guide misleads him, as some redneck women are quite skinny—it takes two of them tied together to swab a gun barrel, as the saying goes...
...I'm talking about the good old rednecks now...
...Or maybe it was the businessman exercising his Christian responsibility by teaching a black man to read...
...Southrons spend their lives in darkest Gethsemane...
...Supernatural or not, however, the Biblical events are more real and sustaining than the food in their bellies: given the choice between their lives and their religion, they'd quickly give up the ghost...
...At that time, perhaps he should settle in Savannah and take up the banjo...
...Not one or two...
...Naipaul is inspiried by the Southern spirit and actually has some fun, showing exceptional interest in a central figure in Southern culture—the redneck...
...He's as lost as a goose...
...Naipaul seems to feel somewhat at home there...
...Here was a mind that entertained two opposite ideas simultaneously and not only functioned but also prospered...
...But as Mr...
...a place where you are buried and await the worms and the archangel's trumpet while your grandchildren chase butterflies beyond the graveyard fence...
...He provides enough descriptions and comparison (this Southern town smells like that African village) to remind us that it's his book, just as the interviews are reminders that he is visiting a world that is new to him...
...they were almost a class...
...They just sit at home...
...A lot of them intermarried, interbred...
...Naipaul are happy at his levity, but many reviewers have criticized the bookfor not paying enough attention to race and the region's other ills—for not being another "Bozart...
...W hatever the reason, Mr...
...He quotes a local expert as they observe one slouching about a motel lounge: "He's [the redneck] probably thinking, with that hair and beard, that he's God's gift to the world...
...He's never been on a tiled floor in his life...
...But he's just a neck...
...In the other corner were many simple people who never left home, yet whose minds traveled to places Mr...
...There was the retired newspaperman in Charleston, South Carolina, who knew every tree in the county and every cloud in the sky...
...At Shoney's you'll get the gravy all over it...
...Great stretches of the text are taken up with interviews, most of them notable for their candor and the willingness of their subjects to return time and again to their own shortcomings...
...He had other interests as well...
...He possessed the sense of place Southerners are famous for, that love of tree stumps, fishin' holes, and bird dogs that is often mistaken for pantheism...
...At one time there were at least four such couples in the hotel—gargantuan, corridor-blocking, and (no doubt the effect of numbers) not without aggression...
...Yard mowed, a little garden in the back...
...I know these sons of bitches...
...their lives following a mule, but all the while their minds are on the Garden of Eden or the fireworks of the Apocalypse or some other unseen and perhaps supernatural event...
...In short, they're full of hope, which Mr...
...Naipaul didn't believe existed, and whose culture was permeated by religious ideas...
Vol. 22 • July 1989 • No. 7
