Finding it at home
David Profumo
SORT OF RICH by James Wilcox Fourth Estate, £6.99, pp. 282 The comic regional novel is not exactly a mode in which British fiction currently abounds, and to claim that North Ameri- can writers steal a march on us in this respect is not to compare like with like for every Rummidge they have a thousand potential Wobegons, and, when it comes to cultural incongruities, Milton Keynes isn't a patch on Florida Keys. Perhaps the truth is, as Flannery O'Connor noted, 'the best American fiction has always been regional'.
James Wilcox has zeroed in on his home state of Louisiana, and the imaginary town- ship of Tula Springs which made its first appearance in Modern Baptists (1983); there have been four more novels since and, taken together, they offer an elegant anatomy of shopping-mall culture, exposing the trash beneath the skin.
Following a chance encounter on the floor of a souvenir emporium in New Orleans, cute widower Frank Dambar has wed Gretchen Peabody Aiken-Lewes, Radcliffe-educated, fortyish Yankee, Mahayana Buddhist and professional worrier. Suddenly translated to the boon- docks, where zucchini-farming is a hobby and folk drive turquoise cars, she is indeed a stranger in a strange land. The decor she inherits is mortician's parlour rococo, but the ménage (to an emotionally uncertain lady of certain years) is nothing less than a shiver in search of a new spine to run up. There's housekeeper Mrs Howard, a Ger- man refugee and domestic tyrant, handy- man Leo (the ponytailed philosopher), and an intellectually precocious maid, Shaerl, interested in Maynard Keynes. Has Gretch made a ghastly mistake? As plots go, not much happens: a cousin plunges into some catfish, we meet a urologist who is a pas- sionate painter, every character suspects the other of plotting, and inevitably the new Mrs Dambar resorts to a therapist. As a bittersweet study of paranoia, this is con- summate; Wilcox nimbly spins and implies with each turn of the page, and the result is thick with misunderstandings. With an empty politesse worthy of Saki, husband and wife indulge in a perpetual dialogue des sourds, the only solution to which is Gretchen's, 'let's don't talk about it.' And then, just as this all seems good fun, Frank suffers a heart attack.
What follows is both harsh and refined. In shock and denial, with no inheritance or family ties, Gretch wheels from being a chatelaine concerned about the hue of the carpets to a youngish widow contemplating suicide. The second part is short, and sud- denly different. Gone is the verbal drollery, but this abrupt change rather unbalances the book: its architecture may be skewed, but the brickwork remains immaculate.
The world according to Wilcox is tacky, Manichean, and exquisitely distorted. Folk eavesdrop, insinuate, procrastinate and harbour murderous thoughts. As a portray- al of the American class system you could wish for nothing sharper. Here are the hall- marks of enduring satire: the constant need to squinny in disbelief at its descriptive details, and the sense that beneath the pasquinade there lies that affection for its very target which distinguishes it from a freakshow.
James Wilcox and his stewed Louisiana world deserve our attention. Here is Flannery O'Connor again: It is a great blessing, perhaps the greatest blessing a writer can have, to find at home what others have to go elsewhere seeking.
So it would seem.
Previous page
