The Elegant Variation: GUEST REVIEW (AND INTERVIEW): SONS OF THE RAPTURE

TEV DEFINED

The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

October 02, 2006

GUEST REVIEW (AND INTERVIEW): SONS OF THE RAPTURE

Sons of the Rapture
By Todd Dills
Featherproof Books
183 pp. (paperback)
$12.95

GUEST REVIEW BY JIM RULAND

Todd Dills’s debut novel is proof that you can take the boy out of the south, but you can’t take the south out of the boy.

Meet Billy Jones, the motherless son of an alcoholic shit-kicker haunted by his past – a cliché if there ever was one, but Bobby represents that segment of the south for whom history is both an insult and a badge of honor, which the Jones clan regards as a license for bad behavior. Billy works in a cube in the Albert Parsons Center by day and wanders the streets of Chicago in a Confederate graycoat and a pistol in his pocket at night, cursing the alien cold as he chases the ghosts of his matricided mother, lunatic brother and a sweet murdered barmaid named Kate. Bobby is every bit as charming as his “rich headcase” father, and he shares his old man’s weakness for whiskey and women (in that order) but he’s no prodigal son. This prompts his father to come to the Windy City and look for him.

The sprawling story is told from the perspective of numerous characters and each one is every bit as conflicted and dysfunctional as Billy, but you won’t find those words here. Drunks are drunks and fuck-ups are fuck-ups. There’s Albert Ledbetter, Billy’s father’s friend; Bobby Jones, Billy’s batshit crazy brother; Ariel Caminos, the Mexican cowboy; Clarence Hickman, Jack Daniel’s enthusiast; Artichoke Heart, a black sexually ambivalent trumpet player who favors shiny jumpsuits and sparkling tiaras, and Thorpe Storm, an aging politician modeled after a backward thinking senator whose political life lasted 80 years. A more ribald cast of characters hasn’t been assembled since Cannonball Run and on the surface they might seem just as shallow, but in Dills’s hands they’re transformed into a southern fried Whole Sick Crew.

Sons of the Rapture is a gloriously ambitious achievement. Dills has crafted a novel that’s as slick, crafty and wise as an Upcountry political fixer. It has the madcap quality of a road novel, an intense sense of place of the best regional writing, and an eminently Faulknerian sense of history where deeds of 150 years ago are as integral to the plot as the details lost to last night’s blackout. Although this is Dills’s debut novel, it feels like the fourth or fifth offering from a seasoned novelist. Sons of the Rapture is an astonishing first novel.

Quiztunes for Todd Dills:

One of the central characters in Sons of the Rapture is obsessed with rats, which is cool, but he spends a lot of time killing them, which is not cool. Have you ever killed a rat?
I have in fact killed a rat, but I didn't use a gun like Billy Jones. I stuck to the more traditional approach. Twas the frigid winter of 02/03, and after an entire loaf of pre-sliced bread disappeared from the top of the refrigerator one lonely, the mangled plastic bag the only evidence of its having ever existed, we knew we had a significant problem. I closed off and then filled the utility closet through which the beasts were entering with traps. It was pretty grisly for a while -- one death every night for a week, big alley-type rats which were apparently living under the kitchen floor of our basement unit in the foundation, then a couple more over the next month. Sad, a little, and yet, victorious. Territory had been violated. We are all apes in the end.

I think I've figured out whom the character "Thorpe Storm" represents: it's Jesse Jackson isn't it?
Yes, he is based on Jesse Jackson, who occupied my imagination as a child quite a lot, actually. Seriously, though, Strom Thurmond might well be the perfect human symbol for the South's political wanderings in the 20th century -- the ultimate opportunist, an adopter of the cause of the day, a powerbroker of immense proportions turned doddering and incoherent with the advent of the new century: the last 100 years of political history in the U.S. are those of the history of the South. The are intractably entwined, as one. The incoherence of the Bush White House mirrors that history exactly. Strom's death in 2003 heralds great things to come, one can hope.

How long does it take for a Southerner to get acclimated to the North?
About a decade, maybe, and just when you've gotten used to the snow and ice and its inevitable effects on the temperaments of the people around you, you move back. Chicago has been a magnanimous place. I've got nothing but great things to say about it, but I'm headed back south with my wife -- to Birmingham, AL -- at the end of October.

You publish and edit a broadsheet called THE2NDHAND. What exactly is a broadsheet?
A broadsheet is a "broad sheet," in terms of THE2NDHAND. It's a big piece of paper on which is printed a single wonderful piece of fiction or nonfiction from one wonderful writer, quarterly (our latest features an excerpt from my book and had a guest editor, but recent issues have seen work by the great Al Burian, the new "Best American Comics" anthology and Punk Planet associate publisher Anne Elizabeth Moore, and a bunch of others: we do an online mag weekly too: www.the2ndhand.com). Some of the first-ever published lit for the rabble, after the advent of the printing press, came in the form of ballad poetry printed on broadsheets and distributed for free on the streets of European cities – we're talking late medieval or early Renaissance. I was inspired by this model, generally, plus the art and political broadsheet has a storied history through the 19th and 20th centuries, of course – there's an exhibit opening this week in Chicago of some Sun Ra broadsheets that were recently discovered, for instance.

You know Todd Taylor and Joe Meno very well. Can you tell us an embarrassing story about either?
Well, I know Meno much better, I guess: did you know he worked for years at the Alley in Chicago in the hardcore SM leather room?

NEXT: Joe Meno’s The Boy Detective Fails.

Posted by TEV at 12:15 AM in Reviews | Permalink

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October 02, 2006