Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Wednesday January 19, 2011
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PURPLE JESUS
Ron Cooper
Bancroft
ISBN 978-1890862701
214 pages
$21.95
Reviewed by Eric Miles Williamson, whose fifth book, "14 Fictional Positions," has just been published. His essay collection, "Say It Hot: Essays on American Writers Living, Dying, and Dead," will appear this summer.
Set in the backwoods town of Cordesville, S.C., Ron Cooper's second novel, "Purple Jesus," features a 400-pound woman; a pistol-packing, revenge-bent beauty named Martha; a half-witted romantic named Purvis, who is in love with Martha; a white-lightning-drinking monk named Brother Andrew, who has taken a vow of silence and expresses himself primarily with a deadly bow and arrow; and a host of shack-dwelling inbreeds in need of serious dental work.
The novel opens with a redneck ritual: the gutting and ransacking of a recently dead person's house. Purvis is tearing out the walls with a crowbar, looking for Armey Wright's stash of cash, all the while cursing at Armey, who sits rotting in a chair with a small-caliber bullet hole in his head. What follows is a white-trash tale of greed, lust, drunkenness and violence. We get country baptisms in muddy, critter-infested creeks, propane tanks, single-wides, cheap beer and cheaper men and women, rusted pickup trucks firing on only a few cylinders, glue factories that grind up dead animals (and people), Rexall drugstores, Bible-toting hypocrites and plenty of tattoos.
We've seen antecedents to Cooper's story and characters before: Erskine Caldwell's "Tobacco Road," Faulkner's "Sanctuary," Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee novels, Chris Offutt's "Kentucky Straight," Barry Hannah's "Yonder Stands Your Orphan" and Michael Gills' "Why I Lie." But though we've had our share of splendid chroniclers of America's good ol' boys, we've rarely had them rendered by a philosopher like Cooper, and perhaps never by an author with such a keen ear and unflagging precision.
Cooper understands that a redneck sees through a redneck's eyes. For Purvis, Martha's arms "fold like the blades of a feeler gauge." The expressions on a changing face shift "like the elusive colors on a fish scale." Someone's abnormally symmetrical face appears bisected "as if someone had snapped a chalk line on it."
Edgar Allan Poe wrote that every word in a short story should contribute to the effect of the whole. Very few American short-story writers have met this standard, and even fewer novelists have managed the feat: perhaps Hemingway, maybe Marilynne Robinson, Roth in "Portnoy's Complaint," Updike in "Rabbit, Run." It's a rare thing indeed, but Cooper keeps their company. "Purple Jesus" is so perfectly written, it's exhilarating to read.
His ability to switch between the muddled minds of lowlifes and the spiritual goulash of intellectual monks is, to this reviewer's knowledge, unprecedented, shockingly astute and aesthetically delightful. In counterpoint to the rednecks, Cooper gives us Brother Andrew, the vowed-to-silence monk and archer. More articulate, philosophical and spiritual than Ken Kesey's silent Chief in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Brother Andrew is the intellectual ballast of "Purple Jesus." (The title alludes to a fruity, white-lightning-spiked concoction.)
While Brother Andrew searches for his reason for being, Purvis searches for Armey's money and longs for Martha's love, and Martha tries to get out of hillbilly hell. Family secrets are somewhat revealed, though no one knows his own lineage for sure, since the women don't know which partner impregnated them.
The ending of "Purple Jesus" is harrowing and perfect, Cooper being not only a master of language and thought, of dialogue and metaphor, but a brilliant plotsmith, too. Details seemingly random become crucial, and events and characters converge in an unexpected yet logical flourish.
The publication of "Purple Jesus" is a literary event of the first magnitude. And once again, like last year's Pulitzer Prize winner, "Tinkers," it comes from a very small publisher.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE LAKE OF DREAMS
Kim Edwards
Viking
ISBN 978-0670022175
384 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Wendy Smith, a contributing editor at the American Scholar, frequently writes book reviews for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times
In her best-selling first novel, "The Memory Keeper's Daughter," Kim Edwards traced the consequences of a father's decision to spirit away a newborn with Down's syndrome and falsely report her as dead. Family secrets and lies are also the subjects of Edwards' new book, which follows a young woman as she tracks the life of a forebear expunged from her family's history.
Lucy Jarrett comes home to an upstate New York village called the Lake of Dreams after years working overseas. A decade ago, she left for college following her father's death in a mysterious boating accident, blaming herself for refusing to go fishing with him that night. She's been traveling ever since, "from college to grad school, from good jobs to better ones and through a whole series of romances, leaving all that grief behind."
Forcibly slowed by a spell of unemployment in Japan, she's having troubling dreams about home, and her boyfriend Yoshi gently suggests that she needs to pay a visit.
It's a strong setup, given added punch by the tensions Lucy describes when she arrives. Her father's estranged brother, Art, plans to develop land formerly occupied by a military depot, while a group that includes her high-school sweetheart wants it protected as a wetlands area.
Then Lucy discovers a stack of old papers in a room that's been closed off since her father died. They include fliers from the early 20th-century feminist movement and an angry note from 1925, signed only with the initial R, that refers to a 14-year-old girl, Iris, being sent away from home. Several convenient coincidences later, Lucy knows that her great-grandfather had a sister named Rose who had a daughter named Iris. "There was some sort of scandal," Lucy's uncle recalls.
Lucy's quest to find out what happened takes her to the Women's Rights National Park in Seneca Falls, N.Y., to the studio of stained-glass artist Frank Westrum and to an abandoned chapel on the disputed depot land. What she sees and learns stirs up old feelings of being excluded from the male-centered church of her youth. But Lucy knows she is more fortunate than Rose, who was arrested for participating in a women's suffrage march, sent away by her family and forced to leave her daughter behind.
Lucy is a well-drawn character, but her motives are not always convincing. When she claims that the discovery of her suppressed family history "raised questions about my past, which I'd always imagined to be written in stone," that supposed certainty doesn't jibe with the unanswered questions surrounding her father's death.
The more serious problem here is that Edwards crams too much material into a narrative that creaks from the strain. A plethora of revelations unfolds over a scant two weeks. The mysterious story of Iris and Rose is told largely through the implausible device of unsent letters, and their tale is linked to more recent family conflicts in contrived ways. A will hidden in a wall, a missing person located in the phone book and a middle-of-the-night confession -- these are signs of an author so intent on getting to a predetermined destination that she forgets to make sure her readers are willing to follow.
Edwards aspires to delineate the complex bonds of family and the tangled web of history in her tale of "beauty and loss surfacing in every generation," but her insights aren't always up to the level of her ambitions. The sections about early feminism often sound like undigested (and slightly didactic) social studies lessons. An exchange between Lucy and Yoshi concerning her predictable attraction to her former boyfriend is typical of the heavy-footed dialogue: "It was over before it began." "I believe you. I'm glad it didn't feel right." But some lovely descriptive passages display a more deft touch, prompting the hope that this talented writer will try to do less and execute more thoughtfully next time around.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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