Religio-Sexual Potpourri:
WALLACE, DAN
Religio-Sexual Potpourri The Watchman. By Davis Grubb. Scribner's. 275 pp. $3.95. By Dan Wallace Reporter, Newport News "Daily Press" Take a Christ-like sheriff seeking salvation for himself...
...Two lovers in their late teens attend the girls but act mostly as straight men in the near vaudevillian intrigue...
...Grubb's people generally speak a great deal about love and hate, the hunters and the hunted, but in this novel they expand their range to include a variety of semi-intellectual declamations about society at large...
...The citizens of Adena reveal a confusion of psychotic roots and tendrils characterized by sex crimes and either uninhibited or unrequited sexuality...
...It was a skillfully wrought, sensitive story of two orphaned youngsters who lived in a world of dream reality and real nightmare in the late 1920s...
...His young men, Cole Blake, a bright but poor glass plant worker, and Jason Hunnicutt, the son of a martinet former army major, remain faceless throughout...
...The book's overwritten poetic prose suggests comparison with bad modern jazz...
...But she invariably inflames the endocrine glands of her boy friends, which keeps the sheriff on the go...
...in fact, it is less a story than a series of case histories...
...Grubb is a skillful writer and can develop dramatic scenes with strong, soaring moods reminiscent of the prose of Thomas Wolfe...
...Insane from a traumatic rape at the age of four, Jill is both the symbol and fact of sexless, spiritual love...
...Its characters and basic situations are relatively static...
...He goes his godly way in a confused, crime-thriller atmosphere that is so heavy with insane sex, murder, blind love and wishful worship as to approach farce...
...Centered in the penitentiary town of Adena, the last stop for itinerant Sheriff Alt, the novel portrays him as a Christ watching over the sleeping citizens, both the conscience of human dignity and a Western-type hero—although he has never used his gun...
...By Dan Wallace Reporter, Newport News "Daily Press" Take a Christ-like sheriff seeking salvation for himself and mankind, add characters striving for human dignity and lesser goals, thrust them into a mad vortex of improbable psycho-sex and sociological melodrama and you have the garish and unsuccessful potpourri of The Watchman, Davis Grubb's latest novel...
...He is most successful in revealing female characters...
...A Dream of Kings, his second book, dealt with two teenage lovers in the Civil War period, but lacked the sustained dramatic force and probability of the first...
...A secondhand dossier of psychiatric information recounted by Cristi provides a complex of pat clues that fail to account for basic motivations...
...These diversions to the main story are introduced by a handful of theatrical town eccentrics who offer didactic orations on law enforcement, penal codes, capital punishment, justice and provincial temperament and mores...
...Her father gives her money to live separately in a rented room...
...Grubb made the bestseller lists and the Hollywood movie market in 1954 with his first novel, The Night of the Hunter...
...The sheriff has been on the run from town to town for years because of his attractive 22-year-old daughter Jill whom he worships and protects...
...Like the previous novels, The Watchman is set in the West Virginia territory along the Ohio River, but the time is the present...
...A professional lawman, Sheriff Luther Alt possesses almost divine qualities of goodness, compassion and love, the results of personal mystic experience...
...Judged on its treatment of a morality concept, a morality rooted in Christian mysticism devoid of the church, The Watchman is a noble failure—and its other facets have little to commend them...
...These qualities are not attainable through instruction, Grubb indicates, and he satirizes the instructors as impotent clowns...
...The sheriff, an inferior version of Dostoevsky's saintly idiot, is either oblivious to the evil within his own family or else unable to cope with it...
...In Adena this Christ finds justice and salvation in a self-willed death on a dead electric chair, an imitation of the crucifixion...
...Tagging along with Sheriff Alt and Jill is his younger daughter, Cristi, who represents the sane purity of uninhibited sexual bliss...
...Grubb's old men are so colorfully and specifically typed that they do appear as believable figures in an improbable story...
Vol. 44 • April 1961 • No. 15
