PARTISAN REVIEW
291
is muggy.
If
the folksy ramblings of his first novel are not Price's true
milieu, neither is the convoluted introspection in which he has lately
been engaged. He is a writer of great intelligence and generous spirit,
but he has not found his subject.
Harry Crews, on the other hand, has found his subject but is mis–
handling it. Like Price, he began with an admirable but derivative first
novel:
The Gospel Singer,
a highly Gothic treatment of Bible Belt piety
and hypocrisy. Since then he has been applying to the vulgarization of
the South a superb talent for black humor. In
Car,
his strengths and
weaknesses are equally on display. The idea is marvellous : the son of a
Jacksonville, Florida, used-car dealer decides to consume a Ford Mav–
erick, morsel by morsel. Crews inflates the situation into an enormously
funny and knowing spoof of America's infatuation with the automobile
- an infatuation that borders on obsession
in
the South - and then,
inexplicably, turns the novel's toughness into flab with a weak and
sentimental conclusion. That has been the pattern of his recent fiction:
rich satire at the outset, sloppy and evasive resolution at the end.
It
is
as though, having amused and even shocked the reader, Crews feels he
must then comfort and reassure him - which leaves the satire with no
real bite.
By comparison with Price and Crews, Doris Betts seems an un–
prepossessing writer; her following is limited mainly to her native North
Carolina, and she has gotten little critical attention. Yet she has pub–
lished a remarkably good collection of short stories,
The Astronomer,
and her novel
The River to Pickle Beach,
though overlong and some–
what disjointed, faces one of the new South's central psychological ques–
tions: In a region where "place" is vanishing, how does one find the
identity and security it offered? She suggests no answer beyond the
shared love of the married couple upon whom the novel focuses, but
it is the question - the acknowledgment of an irrevocably altered South
and the search for ways to comes to terms with it - that is important.
No Southerner can contemplate the diminution of the region's "few
virtues" without a sense of loss and nostalgia, and Mrs. Betts is no ex–
ception; her fiction, however, is involved with the realities of the present.
Those realities, and exceedingly unpleasant ones, are also the sub–
ject of Madison Jones in
A Cry of Absence,
his fifth novel and one of
the best to come out of the South in recent years.
It
is the story of a
vaguely aristocratic woman who lives in a small town and discovers that
one of her two sons is guilty of the brutal murder of a black civil-rights
activist. That is good, solid, "Southern" material, but there is nothing
imitative or anachronistic about the novel. Jones movingly portrays the
