Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 13, 1994 TAG: 9402060196
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by JOAN SCHROEDER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Mississippi native Lewis Nordan was 15 years old when black teen-ager Emmett Till was murdered in a neighboring town for whistling at a white woman. For more than 30 yers, Nordan carried that memory, which, as memories will over time, shifted and took new form. Then he sat down and wrote a novel about it.
Fans of his first novel, "Music of the Swamp," won't be surprised by his latest offering. "Wolf Whistle" is packed with the bizarre, the surreal and the magical, with a strong infusion of Southern Gothic. The book requires you to suspend disbelief and go along for the ride. It's a ride that's not without bumpy detours, and it's one you won't soon forget.
"Wolf Whistle" opens with a fourth-grade field trip to Balance Due, "the white-trash ghetto of Arrow Catcher," to visit a fallen classmate. Young Glenn Gregg lies close to his death in his sorry house, having incinerated himself trying to burn his abusive father to death. First-year teacher Alice Conroy wants her young students to understand, to feel free to ask questions. Instead, they leave speechless, having heard first- hand the horrors of the Gregg family's life.
The novel also closes with a field trip, this one to the trial of Solon Gregg and his employer, Lord Montberclair, charged with murdering a 14-year-old black boy who dared to look a white woman in the eye and wolf-whistle.
The world of this novel is one in which murders are foreseen inside raindrops, the murdered watch their own deaths from their dangling eyeballs, and a parrot passes circling judgment upon the guilty. Omens abound, and the horror of the crime committed is as heavy as the Mississippi-Delta rains, as murky as the swamp waters swirling around the boy's body.
It is, perhaps, a weakness of "Wolf Whistle," this relentless string of symbols and omens. But it's also where Lewis Nordan stands closest to his material, and seems absolutely unafraid of it. We must believe that murdered boys can watch their own deaths because the author clearly believes it.
Nordan's book is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
In "Wolf Whistle," readers won't get anything close to a factual accounting of the Emmett Till murder case. It's probably false advertising even to hold out that possibility to the reader. Lewis Nordan's work takes on nothing less than "the dark and magical and evil world," and if takes symbolic excess and some literary sleight of hand to convey it, that's just how it goes.
"It's a bad world, Coach. It's an evil world we live in," one character says.
And the answer? Classic Nordan. "I know, Cyrus. We'll just have to make do."
Joan Schroeder's first novel will be published soon.
by CNB