THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 1, 1995 TAG: 9509280453
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY AUDREY KNOTH
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
SHARPSHOOTER BLUES
LEWIS NORDAN
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 291 pp. $17.95.
There's reason to be blue about Sharpshooter Blues.
The novel, intended as a comic satire of American violence, wallows in a vulgarity that makes one recoil rather than reflect. And the story it tells is not sufficiently compelling to offset the ugliness. It's a disappointing and disturbing presentation by author Lewis Nordan, who earned the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and other honors for his last novel, Wolf Whistle.
Nordan sets Sharpshooter Blues in the small Mississippi town of Arrow Catcher, which has served as the scene of some of his earlier works. Its central character is a youth known as ``Hydro,'' a moniker that derives from his hydrocephalus.
Hydro and his fisherman father live on an island in a bayou. Nordan's description of this habitat displays the talent that has netted his literary awards:
``Turkey buzzards floated above the swamp like prayers and admired their own reflections in the water. Blue herons and cranes and snowy egrets stood on long legs and ate snakes and minnows in the shallows. Cottonmouth moccasins hung in the willow branches, turtles sat on the logs, alligators lounged in their big nests, which smelled of sugarcane and sorghum and rice and fish.''
Hydro works as a clerk at the William Tell grocery. One day, a group of locals takes to shooting for fun in the yard, under the guidance of a boy named Morgan, known as ``the sharpshooter'' for his marksmanship prowess. Hydro is handed a gun and fires it, displaying impressive aim.
This experience comes in handy for Hydro that evening when a teenage boy and girl on the lam come to the William Tell, intending to rob and murder him. Instead, Hydro shoots and kills them. Much of the rest of the novel centers on the town's refusal to believe that Hydro, rather than Morgan, shot the robbers.
That Sharpshooter Blues is meant to be a sort of satirical commentary on violence is evident from a passage containing the ruminations of Hydro's father, who keeps a large gun in his toolbox.
``Sometimes there was just nothing as satisfying as shooting a gun inside a house . . . It relieved stress. It cemented relationships, strangers or partners in marriage . . . You wouldn't want to be careless with it, you wouldn't want to hurt anybody, but to fire a shot out your bedroom window, say, into a neighbor's garage, or in your own kitchen, into a large appliance, maybe, or just through the ceiling, when you were singing the blues . . . well, there was not a thing in the world to criticize about shooting off a pistol in that case. . . .''
But Nordan's intentions and the lyricism of his nature descriptions drown in the sludge of vileness that pervades the book.
There's the female robber's sexual assault of Hydro, which finishes with her sneering at the boy.
There's the portrayal of the married alcoholic who's been having an affair with the sharpshooter since he was little more than a child.
After the killings at the William Tell grocery, the plot loses focus. It takes a puzzling, ineffective turn toward the mystical near the book's close, with dead people suddenly appearing around town.
While Nordan's intent is to satirize violence, Sharpshooter Blues actually exploits it. It's hard to interpret the gut-turning description of the two bodies being laid out at the local funeral home as anything more elevated than pandering to ghoulish tastes.
Nordan is an English and creative writing professor at the University of Pittsburgh. If Sharpshooter Blues is an indication of what's going on in the nation's classrooms, there's plenty of reason to be blue about the state of American culture. MEMO: Audrey Knoth is a free-lance writer and executive director of public
relations at Goldman & Associates in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
``Sharpshooter Blues'' seems to exploit the violence it sought to
satire.
by CNB