Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 10, 1990 TAG: 9006130479
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The time has passed long since when the American South was, as H.L. Mencken wickedly but accurately called it, the "Sahara of the Bozart."
Mencken's point was that Southern culture - this was the 1920s - was as thin as last week's soup, that apart from a few familiar figures the South had no music, no art and above all no literature.
He could easily have pointed to Virginia, which then boasted no writers of stature but those two hardy Richmonders, Ellen Glasgow and James Branch Cabell, who between them were most of what not only Virginia but Southern literature there was.
All that is a thing of the past now and has been for years. Virginia has been especially blessed in recent decades with writers of national stature. In Charlottesville alone there are Peter Taylor and Marry Lee Set Hoffman's prose is as supple as ever, his narrative skill as sharp as ever. tle, George Garrett and John Casey, Ann Beattie and Sam Shepherd, to name only the headliners. And good writers are everywhere in the commonwealth.
None stands taller than William Hoffman, who graduated from and long taught at Hampden-Sydney, studied a year at Washington and Lee, lives in Charlotte Court House and is the author of nine novels and two collections of short stories.
All of Hoffman's work deserves praise for its seriousness and skill, and recently he has been getting the attention he deserves: a symposium at Longwood dedicated to his work; a guest stint at W&L; increasing critical examination; even, as it happens, recognition that he is the single writer who has never offered a story to the Sewanee Review that the magazine didn't accept.
All of this is by way of saying that Hoffman's tenth novel, just published, is thus an event worth the attention of every literate reader of quality fiction.
"Furors Die" is, like so much of Hoffman, a study of the changing social milieu of Hoffman's native heath - in this case West Virginia, where he grew up. The setting, an unnamed city that sounds a lot like Charleston, is carefully described - a city big enough and varied enough to have a marked class structure that is being subtly changed by changing times.
Against this background Hoffman places two contemporary men, Wylie Duval and Amos "Pinky" Cody, whose parallel lives intertwine, cross and often clash.
Duval, the son of privilege, position and ease, stands at the top of the heap: private school, Washington and Lee, an assured place in his city's business and social structure. Against him is pitted Cody, a poor redneck who rises on ability to power in the law. Duval seems at first complacent, a hedonist; Cody, puritanical and sanctimonious in his fundamentalist religion, seems driven by a need to improve society.
But Hoffman is after bigger game than anything that obvious, and before his tale is told the parallel lives have not only undergone complex interconnections but brought both figures to places of moral reversal.
No one who has read Hoffman's "Godfires" a few years ago will be surprised at that. He does not deal in easy simplicities or in moral absolutes. His view of American society is subtler, and he sees, as few writers do, that human motives are almost always elaborately and inextricably mixed. Heroes and villains, at least in the traditional sense, do not appear.
Hoffman's prose is as supple as ever, his narrative skill as sharp as ever. But what gives "Furors Die" its immense distinction is its steady determination to depict human - and moral - reality. Few of today's Southern writers, good as they are and varied as they are, do it better.
by CNB