海角大神

滨苍听South Toward Home,聽Margaret Eby visits the old stomping grounds of her favorite Southern writers, hoping to see how place shaped their work. It鈥檚 a simple idea that a millennial writer like Eby isn鈥檛 supposed to like. Attendance at historic sites and house museums has been a mixed bag in recent years, presumably because most younger Americans aren鈥檛 much interested in taking tours of rope-lined聽rooms where the great once lived.

But as Deborah Lutz pointed out in "The Bront毛 Cabinet," her recent contemplation of the Bront毛 sisters through the possessions they left behind, a school of scholarship called 鈥渢hing theory鈥� is reviving interest in the relationship between celebrated writers and the physical realities that touched their lives. Eby鈥檚 book affirms that connection, and like Lutz, she happily avoids any hint of pedantry in making her case. There鈥檚 no talk here of paradigms, literary constructs, or narrative frames. Instead, Eby, who grew up in Alabama but now works as a journalist in New York, tackles a more basic but no less complicated question: 鈥淲hat is it about [the South] that inspires so many? 聽What makes the South different?鈥�

In her quest for an answer, Eby travels to places connected with Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Flannery O鈥機onnor, Harry Crews, Harper Lee, Truman Capote, John Kennedy Toole, Barry Hannah, and Larry Brown. She quickly reveals the South not as a monolith but as myriad subcultures, with place as particular as a neighborhood block, a local fishing hole, even an inner bedroom. Eby suggests that this intimate geography has more to tell us about the South and its literature than all the deep-fried clich茅s about the region as a 鈥渄efeated country, some melee of swamps, magnolia trees, and antebellum houses populated by rifle-toting, camouflage-wearing fundamentalists and sneering good old boys scored to menacing banjo music .... 鈥�

Eby鈥檚 book is a welcome antidote to those tired generalities. With the constancy of a compass needle, she gravitates instead toward the telling detail. A self-professed bibliophile who brought books to the dinner table as a child, Eby, like her literary heroes, looks at landscapes and sees stories sprouting from the ground. Visiting Welty鈥檚 garden, she notes that for the renowned Mississippi writer, tending flowers and writing books both sprang from the same impulse to nurture something bright and perfect and memorable. 鈥淔or Welty, gardening was the process that helped distill the imaginative jumble in her head into stories,鈥� Eby tells readers. 鈥淚t was in the garden, Welty wrote in her papers, that she first 鈥榮et myself at a storyteller鈥檚 remove.鈥� 鈥�

Welty would like Eby鈥檚 observant eye. 鈥淐amellias were Welty鈥檚 particular favorite,鈥� Eby writes. 鈥淭hey lined the sides of her house, pale pink or dazzling cherry red, some with names, like Berenice Boddy, that sound like small-town churchgoing folk.鈥� Eby gets a couple of small things wrong. She refers to the novels of James Thurber on Welty鈥檚 shelf, though Thurber wrote no novels. She also mistakenly describes Welty鈥檚 friend William Maxwell as her agent.

But most of "South Toward Home" is so just-right that you wish you鈥檇 written it yourself. Visiting New Orleans for a glimpse of the Lucky Dog hot dog carts that figured in Toole鈥檚 comic "Confederacy of Dunces," Eby describes how many tourists arrive in the city:

"The directions to get there from Mississippi are simple: Follow the highway until the swamp eats it. Eventually, the ground drops out beneath the road entirely.... New Orleans scrolled out before me like a manuscript marked with a sure hand, a play with the director鈥檚 notes scribbled in every street."

Described so magically, the terrain of "South Toward Home" can seem beyond time, but Eby鈥檚 narrative inadvertently chimes with recent headlines. She visits Harper Lee鈥檚 Alabama hometown of Monroeville before the controversial release of "Go Set a Watchman" and so has little to say about that literary firestorm, but news of the long-lost novel gives Eby鈥檚 account a sharpened urgency. And Eby seemed to eerily anticipate this year鈥檚 heated debate about Confederate imagery in this passage about Faulkner: 鈥淭o be Southern is to grow up among the ruins. Southernness suggests a deep, inescapable past, an inability to move forward without the weight of your ancestors.鈥�

Eby鈥檚 take on the texts of the writers she profiles is so perceptive that "South Toward Home" begs for more of it. Although the book aspires to show how place and prose interact, it offers much more travelogue than literary critique. She doesn鈥檛 so much argue for these writers as point us toward them, including a suggested reading list at the end.

Eby doesn鈥檛 definitively determine why the link between and literature in the South is so strong, but like any ardent traveler, she鈥檚 more gratified by the journey than an ultimate destination. 鈥淚t is an ongoing cartographic exercise, to trace and retrace the boundaries of the South, to try and figure out what it contains,鈥� she concludes. 鈥淚t鈥檚 about figuring out just exactly where you are. It鈥檚 about going home.鈥�