At first glance, the landmark 25th edition of Algonquin’s venerable New Stories From the South appears to be alphabetically arranged. It starts off with newcomer Adam Atlas and then moves on to old-timer Rick Bass, who led off 2007’s A-to-Z version—but then it jumps down the alphabet to Brad Watson, who has not only the third story but also the 24th.
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Are guest editor Amy Hempel and series editor Kathy Pories pointing us to a change in Southern literature? “New Year’s Weekend on the Hand Surgery Ward, Old Pilgrims’ Hospital, Naples, Italy” is just the second published story by Atlas—shove over, Uncle Bass—and it isn’t set in the South, unless southern Italy counts. Yet the hapless cast of “New Year’s Weekend”—a bunch of mostly doofuses who have blown off parts of their hands while messing around with firecrackers—easily calls the South to mind. Take these guys named Giovanni and Secondigliano, get them out of Naples, rename them Joe Bob and Junior and drop them down in Greenville (any of the South’s 11 Greenvilles will serve), adjust their dialect a little, and you’re comfortably in the South.
This tale is followed by Bass’ “Fish Story,” which features an 86-pound catfish and is told in a more languorously Southern voice. Where Atlas’ narrator observes in the second sentence that “I began chopping onions and I cut off the end of my thumb,” Bass takes his time before moving into his narrative, in which a 10-year-old must keep the whiskered leviathan alive all day before it becomes a country feast.
Hempel admits that she neither hails from nor lives in the region and observes that rookies and repeaters in her edition are split nearly half-and-half. There are stalwarts like Bass, Tim Gautreaux and Padgett Powell, and there are also young gate-crashers like Atlas and Chapel Hill-born Wells Tower and Kenneth Calhoun.
Calhoun’s “Nightblooming” is a hilarious, finely tuned, disarmingly emotive story about a young prog rock drummer who guests for a swing band of octogenarian retirees and later parties with them. It could be set almost anywhere, and Calhoun isn’t a native Southerner, but plenty of other entries in New Stories bear unmistakable Dixie stamps: A dead deer threatens in Kevin Wilson’s “Housewarming.” After it’s found floating in a man’s pond, it presents that most Southern of head-scratchers: how to git that-there heavy thang up outta there.
Much hasn’t changed in Southern literature. There is only one nonwhite author in this bunch of 24: Danielle Evans. Algonquin is surely aware of the disproportion and presumably wants to correct it, but that hasn’t happened yet. This area is built largely on African-American culture (and, increasingly, on Latino and Asian culture). And in all these 360 pages, no one seems to own a computer, let alone use the Internet. In one story, there is actually a typewriter repairman.
Yet at least one story gives assurances that the Old South is still going strong. Wendell Berry’s “A Burden” is a deceptively complex character study of an old drunk named Uncle Peach, the burden of the title, who is passed down through three generations of the Catlett family. But Uncle Peach is, in fact, what holds that family together.
A great passage appears in that story: Marce was a man driven to small economies, which his artistry made elegant. He once built a new feed barn exactly on the site of the old one, tearing down the old one, reusing its usable lumber as he built the new one, and his mules never spent a night out of their own stalls. His precise fitting of force to work, his neat patches and splices…
The best Southern literature takes the old, scarred and heavy burdens and renders them precisely, fittingly. In “A Burden,” Berry shows youngsters and Northern arrivistes alike how it’s still done down here.—Adam Sobsey
