Steeped in the history of the American south, this debut novel is Faulkneresque fiction at its best
Featuring powerful voodoo, rich soil, racial prejudice and dangerous sex, Bill Cheng's debut novel primarily concerns Robert Chatham, who, as a boy, loses his home and family in the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Increasingly convinced he has a hellhound on his trail, Chatham ricochets between unfortunate scenarios, working in a brothel and, in the novel's most nightmarish section, being held prisoner by boondocks fur trappers.
There is no shortage of Faulkneresque writers marinated in the history of the American south who make their intentions to be serious novelists clear by writing rich and pungent descriptions of landscape and dispensing with speech marks when writing dialogue, but Cheng rises head and shoulders above the crowd by virtue of one very convincing fact: throughout Southern Cross the Dog the reader never has any idea what will happen next.
Chatham's journey across 1920s and 1930s swamplands takes in witch doctors, good-hearted madams and a booze-sozzled proto-Colonel Tom Parker figure, and is as rollicking as the blues that one of its central protagonists, Eli, plays on his beat-up harmonium. It's a book full of flashes of thrilling darkness, surprising acts of kindness from bad people, and a social injustice that really crawls under your skin and angrily pulsates long after the novel is done. The overall effect is something like listening to a great lost country song, watching a Depression-era version of Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke documentary and reading the punchiest Cormac McCarthy novel there ever was, all at the same time.
0 comments:
Post a Comment