Two Southern Novels
Whedon, Julia
Two Southern Novels by Julia Whedon SURELY lady authors spend as much time bending over slender, steaming Southern novels as they do, or did, that proverbial hot stove. Indeed, they seem to...
...In some eerie and unsettling passages the reader (with only the heroine's autism as a point of reference) is swept gently, yet swiftly, along the gathering tide of psychosis...
...But you may ask yourself if, for all your deference towards motherhood, charity, and children playing, you really care about what an idiot thinks or doesn't think, sees—or misses altogether...
...242 pp...
...4), also set in a Southern clime, is the biography of an idiot—his effect on his family and the small rural community where he lives...
...If you do care, you probably won't mind the simpletons that surround the idiot and will share their concerns as they make their primitive, mindless way through life...
...Recently two new titles have been added to the expanding inventory of such novels...
...The sultry morbidity of the domestic scene and the lifelessness of one romance drive her into the arms of a second lover (one of her sister's hand-me-downs) who, having got her pregnant, proceeds to take up with other women...
...Ultimately, the book expresses a striking psychological irony: so long as the heroine remains reflective and inactive in the sickness of her environment, she is intact...
...While both Misses Grau and Williams— most especially Miss Grau— have a respectable, and at times imposing, command of language and imagery, one hopes that they will see fit, in the future, to serve their readers something with a little more protein than these elaborately prepared, paper-thin slices of life which, like tea sandwiches, always leave you hungry...
...The House on Coliseum Street by Shirley Ann Grau (Knopf...
...As is so often the case with sensibility novels, the reader finds himself clinging perilously to the fractured perceptions and impressions of the protagonist...
...Eventually, this largo tale reaches a climax in the death of the idiot, and we are left with the feeling that there must be some philosophic conclusion to be drawn—probably something pastoral concerning the relentless rhythm of life...
...Through death and desertion, he is finally left, as an adult, to the mercy of the villagers...
...It could be argued that this is a legitimate literary exercise...
...The book focuses, largely, on the girl's sense of abandonment and loss —and finally, following an abortion, her calamitous mental and emotional decline...
...248 pp...
...It is not surprising, perhaps, that Miss Williams—having riveted her full intelligence and sensibility upon a figure who is unintelligent and virtually insensate—should have done a good job of it...
...But if you are wicked, not totally undone by the human condition every time it ieaves its wretched mark in life, or upon the printed page, then you may feel that the author has, in her first novel, squandered her talents on an insignificant project...
...The Morning and the Evening by Jean Williams (Atheneum...
...The idiot serves as the catalytic agent exposing their humble, fumbling impulses of good will and greed...
...Indeed, they seem to dish them out with the ease and regularity of short order cooks...
...The story then becomes a chronicle of their agonies, ineptitude, and abuse...
...It is not until she begins to act and takes issue with the events about her that she crumbles...
...Nevertheless, the monolithic perceptions and marginal sensitivity of the idiot are neatly conveyed...
...Miss Grau succeeds in taking full advantage of this subjective, ephemeral relationship as she explores the heroine's mental disintegration...
...3.50) deals with a young Southern woman and her relationships with a marriage-prone mother, assorted halfsisters, two unsatisfactory lovers, and the memory of her father...
...But in any other game this would be called "two against one...
Vol. 25 • September 1961 • No. 9
