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2014
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
The Circuit Rider in a Sable Suit a review by Alison Arant John Milliken Thompson. Love and Lament. New York: Other Press, 2013.
Alison Arant is a visiting assistant professor of English at Wagner College in Staten Island, NY. She earned her PhD in twentieth-century Southern literature at the University of South Carolina in 2012. Her research interests include Southern regionalism, gender studies, and race and reproduction, and she has published articles in Southern Literary Journal and Modern Fiction Studies. John Milliken Thompson’s essays and short stories have been published in a variety of periodicals, including the Smithsonian, the Washington Post, Louisiana Literature, and South Dakota Review. Born in Chatham County, NC, Thompson holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas and currently lives in Virginia.
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John Milliken Thompson’s Love and Lament takes its title from George Herbert’s poem “Bittersweet,” which ends with the lines “And all my sour-sweet days / I will lament, and love.” Though Thompson’s inversion of Herbert’s line makes the better title, his novel, set between 1893 and 1919, places more emphasis on lament than love. The story opens with Thompson’s protagonist, a six-year-old Mary Bet Hartsoe, convinced that she has not only seen the Devil in the form of a dark horse and rider, but also that he will one day come and take her away to eternal punishment. In a scene that balances dread with humor, as Thompson often does, Mary Bet’s mother reassures her that the figure she saw was not the Devil but a Presbyterian circuit preacher. This alternate reading suggests that what seems supernatural may in fact be quite natural. Yet when Mary Bet’s family members begin to successively die from sickness and freak accidents, her sense of foreboding appears confirmed, and the driving tension of the first two thirds of Thompson’s novel stems from Mary Bet’s fear that she and her family live under a curse of increasing potency. Like Thompson’s first novel, The Reservoir (2011), Love and Lament draws on Southern history, its plot unfolding through accumulating revelations. His setting for the new novel is Haw County, NC, a fictionalization of Chatham County, which Thompson describes with convincing texture and careful detail. In exploring the source, contours, and validity of Mary Bet’s sense of doom,
Thompson deals with the burden of history, a familiar topic in Southern literature; yet the past he explores most fully here is that of the Hartsoe family itself, not of the postbellum South as a region. While Thompson naturally works in elements of the novel’s turn-ofthe-century setting – Mary Bet’s birth coincides with the arrival of the railroad, for instance – he also focuses attention on the Hartsoes’ history of generational tensions, religiosity, and mental illness. Mary Bet’s coming of age involves recognizing her family’s suffering not as a punishment for her childhood or adolescent “sins,” like neglecting a pet crow or kissing her brother, but as the result of living in a period of hardship and flux. Against this backdrop, she takes on increasingly prominent roles, both in her family, as her father’s mental health fails, and in the community, as World War I calls away the men of Haw County. One of Thompson’s strengths as a writer of historical Southern fiction is his restraint in incorporating elements of the grotesque, including incest, insanity, and
above RIGHT The former Seaboard Air Line railroad depot in Pittsboro, Chatham County, NC
above FAR RIGHT World War I–era recruiting poster aimed at North Carolina males, circa 1900–29