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2014
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Attend the Tales of Allan Gurganus a review by Gary Richards Allan Gurganus. Local Souls. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2013.
Gary Richards, the author of Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936–1961 (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), is chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication at the University of Mary Washington. See NCLR 2008 for his article on Allan Gurganus’s Plays Well with Others and NCLR 2009 for his interview with and article on Jim Grimsley. Read an essay by Allan Gurganus in NCLR 2007, and hear his short story “Nativity, Caucasian” (from his collection White People [Knopf, 1991]), on NCLR’s Mirth Carolina Laugh-Tracks, a dual CD set of humorous readings and music that accompanied the 2008 humor issue. His novel Plays Well With Others (Knopf, 1997) is reviewed in NCLR 2000, and his novellas The Practical Heart (Knopf, 2001) are reviewed in NCLR 2003. And in the 2014 print issue, read Zackary Vernon’s essay on Gurganus’s annual Halloween haunted house “horror show.”
RIGHT Allan Gurganus (right) on stage with novelist (and Gurganus’s former teacher) John Irving at Barnes and Noble in New York City, 21 Oct. 2013
The publishing team at Liveright seems intent to link Local Souls, Allan Gurganus’s superb new collection of novellas, to Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, his best-selling sprawling comic novel of 1989. This move is expected, given that both books take Falls, NC, population 6,803, as their setting and share in the ongoing literary interrogation of small-town Southern existence – a rich project that has long captivated readers. Mark Twain’s St. Petersburg, William Faulkner’s Jefferson, and Harper Lee’s Maycomb all come readily to mind here, as do sites that share mythic North Carolina, such as T.R. Pearson’s Neely and Randall Kenan’s Tims Creek. And yet, save for a passing mention or two of the historical marker on Lucy Marsden’s house (and the first novella’s suspiciously Gurganus-esque narrator who has just finished a sprawling novel about the Civil War), Local Souls stands apart largely from Confederate Widow. The Falls of the new collection looks forward into the twenty-first century rather than backward into the nineteenth, as Confederate Widow does. Moreover, the novellas feature darker tones, motifs, and humor, and, even when the collection is considered in its entirety, it is far briefer than the earlier novel. Therefore, instead of readers bringing with them to Local Souls a requisite familiarity with Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, they might productively recall the specifics of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s darkly comic Grand Guignol musical of 1979. Gurganus conspicuously begins “Fear Not,” the first of the three loosely linked novellas, with the citizens of Falls – “the Fallen,” as they are known –
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attending the local high school’s production of this musical thriller. He even includes it in his handdrawn map of the town, placing the musical’s title in parentheses below the label for Falls High. Chock full of reappearance and revenge leavened with cannibalism, Sweeney Todd allows Gurganus, with one deft, extended allusion, to prepare his readers for the considerable demands and delights that lie ahead in Local Souls. Perhaps most significant, engrossing melodrama saturates the novellas as much as it does the musical. Just as Sweeney Todd features a procession of persons who have their throats slit by the crazed barber and are baked into meat pies before a final orgy of blood and coincidence, Local Souls proudly parades its excess. In “Fear Not,” a dashing young banker dies in a boating accident – “How clean and effective: one stainless-steel propeller decapitates the smiling water-skier” (24). Also, a woman reunites with the son taken from her at birth and seemingly becomes his surrogate wife now that he has reached adulthood, allowing the narrator to conclude, “Same events that overwhelm Greek dramas live on side streets paying taxes in our smallest towns” (86). In “Saints Have Mothers,” a cloyingly perfect high school girl reportedly drowns while do-gooding in Africa but returns to Falls in time to disrupt her own funeral. And in “Decoy,” the last, longest, and most intricate of the novellas, a genetic defect dooms four generations of men and their hearts to lives of anxiety, an eccentric veteran of World War I wills away a small fortune in payment for honest carpentry and banana pudding, and a hurricane pushes the River Lithium out of its banks with devastating effects.