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expendablemudge's review
3.0
Real Rating: 3.25* of five
Not quite a half-star above three...a bit on the mannered side for my taste.
Borden Deal was one of those "famous if you know who they were/are" figures that literature specializes in producing (eg, David Foster Wallace, JT LeRoy). He was a humidly Southern kind of storyteller, making a lot of psychosexual hay while the sun of Public Disapproval still shone; his career was a lot slower, and a lot heavier on "erotica," after the Swingin' Sixties got started.
This is his last novel before hard drinkin' and smokin' killed him at 62, in 1985. It's probably good that he died before he heard what folks were saying. Teeny-weeny New Horizon Press of Far Hills, New Jersey, brought it out...that should say something to you, since the 1950s and 1960s saw his books under Doubleday and Scribner colophons. His moment had passed; the Broadway play based on his novel The Insolent Breed and the film based on Dunbar's Cove were decades past by then. There was no way this little Gothic novel about narrator-Borden, poor sharecropper's son, coming of bisexual age in the Great Depression, would've made the grade at Doubleday!
It's not a bad book. It's got the kind of heightened language that was out of fashion in the 1980s, putting Deep Thoughts in Countrified expressions in the mouth of a 13-year-old. Much about the story would've made it a bestseller in 1965, what with narrator-Borden developing a serious crush on Charles, while all-but ignoring Frances the living breathing girl on his doorstep. The faux-country "ain't"s and so on would've gone down a treat then, as well. But in 1985 that was not the first stare of regionalism and, mid-AIDS crisis, narrator-Borden's nascent bisexuality wasn't enough to épater les bourgeois anymore.
The Gothic image of the house turned inwards, the dark and spooky doings inside, the mighty-are-fallen family that Charles comes from...standard. Michael McDowell does it better in his atmospheric horror novels of roughly the same vintage (eg, [b:The Flood|467103|The Flood (Blackwater, #1)|Michael McDowell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328475829l/467103._SY75_.jpg|455468], [b:Cold Moon Over Babylon|571283|Cold Moon Over Babylon|Michael McDowell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1271600351l/571283._SY75_.jpg|558316]). The ending, which I will not spoil, involves a purification rite that's not in the least bit overused. /irony
The novel's short and the read's quick. My county's library system lost its only copy of this marvy, but entirely on their own recognizance sourced a copy for me to read via ILL from Mississippi! Of course, I imagine a native son's books are thick on the ground there, so it's not like it was a hardship for the lenders, but still...!! I'm always amazed and delighted when people go out of their way to fulfill patrons' idle whims in reading material as part of the service, unheralded, unasked, and I'm sure largely unnoticed and unappreciated.
I noticed. I'm most appreciative. I wish the read had been more exciting.
Not quite a half-star above three...a bit on the mannered side for my taste.
Borden Deal was one of those "famous if you know who they were/are" figures that literature specializes in producing (eg, David Foster Wallace, JT LeRoy). He was a humidly Southern kind of storyteller, making a lot of psychosexual hay while the sun of Public Disapproval still shone; his career was a lot slower, and a lot heavier on "erotica," after the Swingin' Sixties got started.
This is his last novel before hard drinkin' and smokin' killed him at 62, in 1985. It's probably good that he died before he heard what folks were saying. Teeny-weeny New Horizon Press of Far Hills, New Jersey, brought it out...that should say something to you, since the 1950s and 1960s saw his books under Doubleday and Scribner colophons. His moment had passed; the Broadway play based on his novel The Insolent Breed and the film based on Dunbar's Cove were decades past by then. There was no way this little Gothic novel about narrator-Borden, poor sharecropper's son, coming of bisexual age in the Great Depression, would've made the grade at Doubleday!
It's not a bad book. It's got the kind of heightened language that was out of fashion in the 1980s, putting Deep Thoughts in Countrified expressions in the mouth of a 13-year-old. Much about the story would've made it a bestseller in 1965, what with narrator-Borden developing a serious crush on Charles, while all-but ignoring Frances the living breathing girl on his doorstep. The faux-country "ain't"s and so on would've gone down a treat then, as well. But in 1985 that was not the first stare of regionalism and, mid-AIDS crisis, narrator-Borden's nascent bisexuality wasn't enough to épater les bourgeois anymore.
The Gothic image of the house turned inwards, the dark and spooky doings inside, the mighty-are-fallen family that Charles comes from...standard. Michael McDowell does it better in his atmospheric horror novels of roughly the same vintage (eg, [b:The Flood|467103|The Flood (Blackwater, #1)|Michael McDowell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328475829l/467103._SY75_.jpg|455468], [b:Cold Moon Over Babylon|571283|Cold Moon Over Babylon|Michael McDowell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1271600351l/571283._SY75_.jpg|558316]). The ending, which I will not spoil, involves a purification rite that's not in the least bit overused. /irony
The novel's short and the read's quick. My county's library system lost its only copy of this marvy, but entirely on their own recognizance sourced a copy for me to read via ILL from Mississippi! Of course, I imagine a native son's books are thick on the ground there, so it's not like it was a hardship for the lenders, but still...!! I'm always amazed and delighted when people go out of their way to fulfill patrons' idle whims in reading material as part of the service, unheralded, unasked, and I'm sure largely unnoticed and unappreciated.
I noticed. I'm most appreciative. I wish the read had been more exciting.
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