Dave Barry's Greatest Hits, Diamond Dust, and The Southerner's Handbook

This is a report on a couple of books I finished this week.

Dave Barry's Greatest Hits - As I knew it would be, this is a hoot. It contains a collection of columns Barry wrote for the Miami Herald and was published in 1988. Barry offers his bizarro thoughts on a wide variety of topics from a review of his son's kindergarten play "The Cave Man" to pot shots taken at Reagan, Oliver North, television evangelists, and dinosaurs. He is a funny, funny man. 

Diamond Dust - Another mystery starring Bath's most famous murder investigator Peter Diamond. I love this series written by Peter Lovesey. In this, the seventh, someone very close to DS Diamond is murdered. As he is not allowed to be involved in the formal investigation - he is even considered a suspect - he has to conduct his own unofficial inquiry into the crime.

The Southerner's Handbook - A couple of years ago I was spending a quiet weekend at a fine old hotel, the Beaumont Inn, in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. On the bedside table were copies of a magazine I had never heard of - Garden & Gun. I thought it an odd juxtaposition of subjects but found the publication to contain some finely written articles on Southern living. 

This book is a collection of short essays on Living the Good Life put together by the editors of G&G. It is a delight and takes a look at the food and drink, style, sporting and adventure, homes and gardens, and arts and culture of the large area of the country that makes up The South. Here the genteel reader will learn how make Southern biscuits and gravy; how and when to wear seersucker; ways to collect mint Julep cups; how to get invited back as a house guest; the intricacies of college football rivalries; and, how to create a year round cutting garden. There is a laugh-out-loud ode to that iconic Southern libation, sweet tea (also known as hillbilly heroin!). 

But best of all are instructions on how to stock your home library.
Here is the list of five essential Southern books according to Richard Howorth, founder and owner of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) by James Agee and Walker Evans

The Moviegoer (1961) by Walker Percy (I wrote about this one here.)

The Complete Stories (1971) by Flannery O'Connor

All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (1974) by Theodore Rosengarten

Long, Last, Happy (2010) by Barry Hannah

Per chance, do any of these books grace your shelves?

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Walker Percy was diagnosed with tuberculosis at age 26. He had just graduated from medical school in 1941, and ended up spending years in a TB sanatorium in upstate New York. He wiled away the days reading Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Soren Kierkegaard. 

That explains a lot. 

In reading his novel The Moviegoer (1961) those existential themes of alienation, search for meaning, and loss of faith are so prevalent in the philosophical musings of narrator Binx Bolling. 

Binx is a 30-year-old stockbroker living in New Orleans in the 1950s. He visits his aunt of the Grand Southern Tradition on Sundays and Wednesdays. 

At one point she tells him:

More than anything I wanted to pass on to you the one heritage of the men of our family, a certain quality of spirit, a gaiety, a sense of duty, a nobility worn lightly, a sweetness, a gentleness with women - the only good things the South ever had and the only things that really matter in this life.

High standards for Mr. Bolling to meet.

He would rather fall in love with whatever secretary happens to be working for him. He likes to carry on imagined conversations with manly movie stars - William Holden, Gary Merrill, Gregory Peck - and spends his time at the movies to escape the everydayness - the enemy, he calls it - of his life. He has a close relationship with his step-cousin Kate who suffers from some sort of depression or mental illness. 

You can see the story is not all Southern sweet tea and light.

That said, I am glad I read the book for the simple reason that I had not read any of Mr. Percy's work and he has a fine reputation. But, living in the head of a 30-year-old Lost Boy in Angst is not something I would want to do very often. I kept thinking I was meeting up with an older, Southern Holden Caufield but without all the bad words. 

I suggested this book to a friend of mine who had lived in New Orleans at one time. He loved reading about the streets and the neighborhoods of the city but agreed with me that our time of wandering aimlessly had long since passed. We survived the despair and malaise of that stage in life and have moved on.

All in all, I would recommend The Moviegoer as Mr. Percy does have a way of capturing small details in his characters' mannerisms and evoking the atmosphere of that part of the country.

Evening is the best time in Gentilly. There are not so many trees and the buildings are low and the world is all sky. The sky is a deep bright ocean full of light and life. A mare's tail of cirrus cloud stands in high from the Gulf. High above the Lake a broken vee of ibises points for the marshes; then go suddenly white as they fly into the tilting salient of sunlight. Swifts find a windy middle reach of sky and come twittering down so fast I think at first gnats have crossed my eyelids.

Down on the Bayou

I am halfway through Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. Binx Bolling is the narrator. He is a thirty-year-old stockbroker, a Korean War veteran, and he has a penchant for briefly falling in love with his secretaries. Binx is a bit adrift in his hometown of New Orleans. Between dinners with his aunt, conversations with his depressed cousin Kate, and going for a spin in his MG, he ponders the everydayness of his life. 

Percy has a way of evoking the slowness in the South (it's the heat!) and certainly has a way of turning a descriptive phrase. Here are bits from early morning on the dock at his mother's house on the bayou.

The world is milk: sky, water, savannah. The thin etherlike water vaporizes; tendrils of fog gather like smoke; a white shaft lies straight as a ruler over the marsh.

and this...

The water of the bayou boils up like tea and disgorges bubbles of smoke. The hull disappears into a white middle distance and the sound [of the motor] goes suddenly small as if the boat had run into cotton.

The boards of the dock, warming in the sun, begin to give off a piney-winey smell. The last tendril of ground fog burns away, leaving the water black as tea. The tree is solitary and mournful, a poor thing after all. Across the bayou the egret humps over, as peaked and disheveled as a buzzard.

later...

The egret pumps himself up into the air and rows by so close I can hear the gristle creak in his wings.

Coincidences of Time

I notice when months, days, and years are mentioned in a book that I am reading and love when they correspond to the actual time that I am reading the book.

For example, today I began reading Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. The second sentence has the narrator, Binx Bolling, state that  "today is Wednesday" and sure enough, in my world as well, today is Wednesday. The action takes place in New Orleans around the time of Mardi Gras which would also be about this time of year.

In another coincidence of time, on Friday I bought at a book sale the Modern Library Edition of Montaigne - Selected Essays. In his  'To The Reader' description of what one can expect from the book, Montaigne writes these words:

So farewell, from Montaigne, this first day of March, fifteen hundred and eighty. 

OK. So I bought this book, to the day, 433 years after Montaigne penned those words.

I just think these coincidences are kind of spooky. But in a good, bookish sort of way.

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Walker Percy
(1916-1990)

Walker Percy was added to my list of authors to investigate by way of my Grand Southern Literary Tour. He and Shelby Foote were life-long friends and grew up together in Greenville, Miss. 

Percy's grandfather and grandfather both committed suicide. His mother was killed in an automobile accident and Percy suspected it was suicide as well. He was raised as agnostic but in later life converted to Catholicism.

With both his parents dead, he and his two brothers moved to Greenville when he was 13 to live with a second cousin. That is where he met Foote. The two went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill together and Percy went on to receive a medical degree from Columbia in New York City.

He and Foote once went to pay homage to William Faulkner in Oxford, Miss. The story goes that Percy was too in awe of Faulkner to actually talk to him. He sat in the car while his friend and Faulkner chatted on the porch of Rowan Oak

When Percy's first novel came up as a Kindle Deal of the Day I snapped it up at $1.99. The Moviegoer (1961) won the National Book Award and, as Percy described it, is the story of "a young man who had all the advantages of a cultivated old-line southern family, a feel for science and art, a liking for girls, sports cars, and the ordinary things of the culture, but who nevertheless feels quite alienated from both worlds, the old South and the new America."

I don't know how I feel about reading about an alienated young man but I am willing to give Mr. Percy a try. Here is the opening paragraph:

This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch. I know what this means. Since I go there every Sunday for dinner and today is Wednesday, it can mean only one thing: she wants to have one of her serious talks. It will be extremely grave, either a piece of bad news about her stepdaughter Kate or else a serious talk about me, about the future and what I ought to do. It is enough to scare the wits out of anyone, yet I confess I do not find the prospect altogether unpleasant. 

Based on those lines, I don't find the prospect of reading The Moviegoer altogether unpleasant either.