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JONATHAN YARDLEY
gradual destruction of the curtain of illusions with which the woman
has surrounded herself, the desperation with which she clings to "family"
against the proof of its corruption. In
A Cry of Absence
we see the
white South in its last sad flailings against the inevitable. Place, com–
munity, and history all figure in the novel, but in t1he changed situation
of a South facing up to its moral obligations.
Cormac McCarthy is an entirely different matter. His realm is the
mythic, and his South is a dark, brooding land of forests, dusty roads,
tumbled shacks. ·His nal'ratlive gifts are considerable, and in
Outer Dark
he tells a gruesome, fascinating tale: a girl has a child by her brother,
with whom she lives alone in the Tennessee woods; he attempts to get
rid of the infant, but it is found by a tinker who takes it with
him
on
his journeys; the girl, sensing that the child is alive, sets off in pursuit,
and the brother in turn follows her. I t is a picaresque horror story,
reminiscent of Jerzy Kosinski's
The Painted Bird,
but for all its use
of violence and the grotesque it is more universal than Southern;
Outer
Dark
occupies its own world.
If
McCarthy is "Southern" at all, it is for
the Faulknerian tone of his prose and the darkness of his vision.
The youngest novelists in this group are James Whitehead and
Charles Gaines, each of whom has written a novel set in the world of
sport. The subject may seem trivial, but in the postwar South sport has
assumed untoward social and psychological overtones. In Whitehead's
Joiner
the sport is football, as played in small-town Mississippi,
in
a
state college football factory, and in the pros. The novel is narrated by
"Sonny" Joiner, "an essentially honest fat giant who, God curse the
same, enjoys histories, and how they get told." His personal history
is
a
scrambled mess of football, sex, whiskey, violence, and amateur phil–
osophy, but through it all Whitehead has managed to place traditional
themes - particularly that of the burden of racism - in a convincing
contemporary setting. Joiner himself becomes a metaphor for the whole
South, past and present warring with each other, gentleness and violence
intermingled.
Gaines's
Stay Hungry
is far tighter in construction, and overall
more successful. One would not expect to meet
its
people in a Southern
novel- they are a group of Birmingham, Alabama, weightlifters and
gymnasium hangers-on - but Gaines makes a great deal out of them.
In the relationship between Joe Santo, hero of the bodybuilders, and
Craig Blake, a wealthy dilettante, he draws a sharp and revealing con–
trast between people who are exuberantly engaged in life and the flac–
cid rich who go slumming among them, "living" vicariously. The novel
would be better were its resolution more definite, but it is distinguished
