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Reviewed by Alex Tripodi
Read enough reviews of contemporary Southern writers and a Groundhog Day sort of feeling sets in. Obligatory comparisons to Faulkner, O’Connor, McCullers, and Capote, along with phrases like ‘Southern Gothic’ and ‘grotesque’ seem to appear in any review or blurb for a book written south of the Mason-Dixon. Whether due to lack of creativity on the part of reviewers or too much hero-worship among Southerners, one could almost believe that one person wrote all Southern fiction under several pen names.
Then there’s Clyde Edgerton, a man whose name has likely never appeared in the same sentence as the phrase ‘Southern gothic’ (well, until now). His work owes little to William Faulkner; is written in far plainer language and concerned with more mundane themes. More sociologist than philosopher, Edgerton uses his characters not so much to convey an idea but rather to help us understand life as he sees it in his beloved North Carolina. His poor country folk are not in need of radical redemption, as in Flannery O’Connor’s world, nor stoically doomed, as in Faulkner’s. Rather, they are mostly good- perhaps a little naïve at worst- and hardship is more the result of happenstance than malice.
For example, Edgerton sees goodness in, and devotes much attention to, Southern holy-rolling Protestantism, a phenomenon disparaged or ignored by most writers. Church scenes pervade his books, as do hymn readings (he even penned his own hymn in Walking Across Egypt) and meditations on Bible verses. The disparity between white and black spirituality, and between Southerners’ piety and their propensity for hell raising- that “duality of the Southern thing” in the Drive-By Trucker’s phrase- are defining elements of Southern culture for this writer. These contradictory impulses have created an ultimately comic culture in the South. Edgerton’s new work, The Night Train, corrals these elements into a very funny, and peculiar, little book.
The setting is Starke, North Carolina, 1963. The town is bisected by train tracks (among other factors), with white families living mostly to the East and black families mostly to the West of them. Racial antagonism is present, but comparatively mild. One could say The Night Train is a book about race relations in the South, but this calls to mind scenes of lynchings and church bombings, or of the Shakespearean bombast of Absalom, Absalom! . This is North Carolina though, and, as our narrator reminds us, the sixties weren’t as strained here as they were in Alabama or Mississippi. Tension brews but never bubbles, and life is unjust but not tragic.
All this is to say that very little happens in Starke, North Carolina, and consequently, very little happens in The Night Train. Readers who demand a hard-driving plot will find the book tedious, but those who make it through the book will come to better understand the political and cultural changes that were beginning to surface in the early sixties.
The Night Train follows Larry Lime Beacon of Time Reckoning Breathe on Me Nolan (named, like all the Nolans, by his eccentric Aunt Marzie, and called Larry Lime for short), a black teenager and aspiring jazz pianist, and his friend and coworker Dwayne Hallston, a white kid who wants to be James Brown (“Night Train” is his favorite song by the Godfather of Soul). As the two obsess over and hone their craft, music comes to symbolize much of what is unique and unfair about this time and place. Larry Lime, who reveres Thelonious Monk, is the better musician, but Dwayne is more successful. Dwayne likes ‘black music’ (rock and R&B) better than white (country), but finds it alien and somewhat frightening at the same time. This ‘black’ music is informed by the African-American gospel tradition, but is attacked on religious grounds. And parents on both sides of the tracks can’t quite make sense of this new music their kids are listening to, though families in Starke are otherwise very tight-knit.
Dwayne’s band, the Amazing Rumblers, want nothing more than to appear on The Brother Bobby Lee Reese Country Music Jamboree, a local variety show that showcases amateur acts and is watched religiously by all of Starke, white and black. Reese’s show is, in one sense, a low-rent, early version of Hee Haw (Reese eating dog food is the shows major motif). But the role it plays in the life of Starkevillians is profound: Bobby Lee’s “…apparent naïve generosity and his ability to talk to black people under the white radar,” make him an unintended source of unity between black and white. Bobby Lee’s naiveté is only apparent, however: he is in fact a degreed historian (and Yankee) who has fallen in love with this region and its history and gotten the TV hosting job almost by accident. He has studied Starkes’ people, black and white, and learned to emulate their storytelling, accent, and folksy demeanor. Scattered throughout The Night Train’s twenty-nine chapters are interviews of Bobby Lee, conducted sometime past 1963, by Rumblers’ drummer Donnie Howell (who ends up an academic himself). These interviews allow the books most surreptitiously articulate character to express what he, as a somewhat remote observer, is able to sense about the changing political climate in this sleepy region. And when the light humor and ‘white’ music expected by the Jamboree’s producer come head-to-head with the ‘black’ music influencing upcoming acts like the Rumblers, you can expect Bobby Lee to have some interesting things to say about it.
The Night Train is a thoughtful and interesting book, if not an exciting one. There are, of course, moments of outright hilarity, as any fan of Edgerton would expect (“What they wanted was a leisure class that could paint pictures and read books…What would you learn in a leisure class?”), but mostly there is the rote day-to-day of poor whites and poor blacks working with and against each other, trying to figure out their place in the burgeoning Civil Rights era. Though not a must-read, Night Train will be enjoyed by serious Southern Lit buffs, Edgerton fans, and those who see (or want to see) the world as a somewhat lighter place than novelists typically imagine.
Doubleday
Simon and Schuster
St. Martin’s Press
