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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y R E V I E W
NAMING THE UNNAMEABLE AND COMMUNICATING THE UNKNOWABLE a review by Christy Alexander Hallberg Michael Gaspeny. A Postcard from the Delta. Livingston Press, 2022. Michael Parker. I Am the Light of This World. Algonquin Books, 2022.
CHRISTY ALEXANDER HALLBERG wears several vocational hats: Teaching Professor in the English Department at ECU, Senior Associate Editor of NCLR, author, and, donned recently, podcaster. Following the publication of her own rock novel, the award-winning Searching for Jimmy Page (Livingston Press, 2021), Pantheon Podcast Network invited her to host Rock is Lit.
Full disclosure: I’m obsessed with rock novels – stories as feral as headbangers in a mosh pit or as sweet with melody and harmony as the most earnest singer-songwriters or as rife with mystery and lore as the whiskeysoaked voice of a bluesman. When rhythm and backbeat collide with prose, the result is often explosive, or at least worthy of a Largehearted Boy playlist. Two of my most recent favorite rock novels just happen to have been penned by fellow North Carolina natives: Michael Parker’s I Am the Light of This World and Michael Gaspeny’s A Postcard from the Delta. Like the protagonists of their books, both Michaels are rabid music fans. “Music is everything to me. I am distrustful of people who don’t listen to music,” Michael Parker proclaimed when he was a guest on my podcast on rock novels, Rock is Lit, in the fall of 2022. This is a sentiment echoed by Michael Gaspeny when he too appeared on Rock is Lit that fall.* And it is the creed by which their main characters live their fictional lives. I Am the Light of This World and A Postcard from the Delta explore myriad themes and topics – socioeconomic issues and the criminal justice system, homophobia, and the transformative power of water in the former; racial tensions, absentee mothers, alcoholism, and toxic masculinity and high school football in the latter – but it’s the role music plays in the stories that I’ve chosen to
* Hallberg’s Rock is Lit podcast featuring Michael Parker, episode 11, 17 Nov. 2022; Michael Gaspeny, episode 12, 24 Nov. 2022.
Fall 2023
focus this review on. As Leonard Bernstein once said, “Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.” Add a compelling plot and cast of characters, and you’ve got something even more elusive and, dare I say, ethereal. I Am the Light of This World by Michael Parker is a gripping story that follows Earl, a musicloving dreamy teenager who serves time in a Texas prison for a heinous crime he didn’t commit, then, upon his release some forty years later, has to navigate a whole new world he can barely comprehend. The novel, which begins in the early 1970s in a small east Texas town, takes its title from the song “I Am the Light of This World” by blues and gospel singer Blind Gary Davis, who was a fixture on the Piedmont blues scene of Durham in the 1930s but rejected “the Devil’s music” in favor of gospel tunes after he became an ordained Baptist minister, then experienced a career rebirth as part of the American folk music revival that peaked during the 1960s. The lyrics of the chorus, “Just as long as I’m in this world, I am the light of this world,” resonate with a young Earl, who struggles to create meaning and a sense of belonging in his life, and he often quotes these words when he finds himself in precarious situations. For example, when Earl is at a party in Austin shortly before the crime occurs for which he will be arrested,