Books on Southern Fiction

1) On Agate Hill
By Lee Smith
Shannon Ravenel, 2006

Writing through the years, Lee Smith has shown us ­spirited, attractive young women taking their chances in life's strong currents. "On Agate Hill" takes place just after the Civil War, when an orphan named Molly Petree is sent to live with a North Carolina family that is blighted by death and poverty. The ­little girl finds a secret room in their great house on Agate Hill and from there spies down on the yard and listens through the chimney. Then a mysterious benefactor appears, enabling Molly to go out for schooling—followed by work, love, marriage and tragedy in a devastated land struggling to revive. The sturdy characters endure and eventually flourish. Lee Smith sticks close to the actual in her work; she can bring a story to life because it is life, however improbable, unpredictable, ­hilarious or grim. The girl in the secret room, seeing all and hearing all, could serve for the author herself.

2) The Last Gentleman
By Walker Percy
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966

Walker Percy's heroes always seem to be the author himself, searching for aim and answers. In "The Last Gentleman," an endlessly polite, sincere and lovable Alabaman named Will Barrett ventures comically through all the crazy creeds and lifestyles of the 1960s, only to wind up adrift in New York. Then he sees a girl in Central Park and falls in love. In finding her he also finds her family, rich and Southern. They look to him as a guide companion for their terminally ill son, ­Jamie. Now Will has love, family and purpose. But is simple Will the ­author's only projected self? We suspect not, for Percy is never satisfied with easy answers. Within the family Will joins is an older son, a brilliant, cynical doctor named Sutter; and a sister, a Roman Catholic nun, Val. The true line of the novel now appears. Is Percy not only Will but also Sutter? The doctor (Percy trained as a medical man, too) writes a journal of philosophic nihilism scoffing at the possibility of human transcendence. Will and Sutter, the mocking alter-ego, make up the novel's core. Yet at Jamie's dying, when a priest arrives, it appears that Will may at last find an answer ­nestled in the folds of the ancient ­Roman church. The novel's laughs are far behind us, and the issues are life and death.

3) A Gathering of Old Men
By Ernest J. Gaines
Knopf, 1983

How nearly impossible for an African-American writer from the South to write fiction without becoming consumed by hatred for wrongs sustained, for brutality endured. Yet Ernest Gaines manages the task admirably, addressing racial matters but telling stories unencumbered by bitterness. In "A Gathering of Old Men," a black man who works on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s shoots and kills an arrogant white farmer. The plantation owner, a white woman, is determined to defend him and brings together more than a dozen neighbors—all old black men, like the shooter—each armed with a shotgun, each confessing to the crime when the sheriff arrives. What can a fair-minded policeman do? The voice of the KKK is heard but does not prevail. I see this as in many ways a comic story. These ancient black men take a dangerous stand and find that their daring becomes a personal liberation. I can all but hear Ernest Gaines chuckling in the background.

4) The Known World
By Edward P. Jones
Amistad, 2003

It is known from history that African-Americans in Virginia in the 19th century owned not only large properties but also slaves. What community existed among these slaves and their black owners and the white plantation owners who lived nearby? That is the concern of Edward Jones's imagination in "The Known World." Of course, there is miscegenation in the story; of course, there is love and trust and cruelty and betrayal. There is also the threat of the approaching Civil War. Efforts are made to escape as human beings are bought and sold, or purchase their freedom. But it takes more than skillful writing to bring this story alive; it demands imaginative power to conjure the daily actions and feelings of people involved in a time of fear and change. Jones sees clearly that when authority fails, ignorance and exploitation take over, and the weak become victims.

5) Edisto
By Padgett Powell
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984

On the Carolina coast in a development that never developed, ­Simons, a precocious 12-year-old, lives with his divorced mother, who drinks too much. In a shack nearby, an attractive man of mixed race, called Taurus, has come to live. He is a ­figure who seems to Simons as "shimmery as an islander's god and solid as a butcher." Taurus will indeed turn into a god of sorts. His job as a process server leaving him plenty of spare time, Taurus becomes the boy's companion and guide, a mentor in ­everything from fishing to sex. When Taurus finally leaves, Simons says, "I don't want to get lugubrious"—just the sort of touch that makes this growing-up story a delight.