The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 9 March 2009
by Shirley Ann Grau
For many Northern Americans, views of race relations in the South are formed by listening too much to Neil Young's Southern Man and Lynyrd Skynyrd's sardonic response Sweet Home Alabama. That's about it, and it is, of course, far too simplistic a formulation. Northern readers may never understand the psychology of the South and its people's relationship to its history, traditions, and its past sins. Southerners must ever remind us about this. In the South you can see a pickup truck with a Confederate flag bumpersticker on one side and a United We Stand sticker on the other. Irony not included. Time may not have healed all wounds, but it has, perhaps, made the landscape somewhat surreal and susceptible to hidden ironies. This isn't to say that the South, like any place in the country, is free of its past merely because it's the past. Racial politics is still to be found everywhere, and is still capable of generating bizarre and sometimes horrific consequences. It just isn't a simple thing, nor has it ever been. So it is that this complex cultural landscape has resulted in some of the most subtle and compelling of American literature, most notably in Faulkner. Which is an apt analogy, as Shirley Ann Grau's riveting epic of a century in the life of one Southern family exhibits much of the elegance and moody depth of Faulkner's work. The book opens in ominous fashion, with Abigail Howland reflecting on the ghostly lives that haunt the historic mansion in which she lives. The suggestion is that things haven't been going well in her town, the locals are restless, and she is unhappy with her relatives. But she leaves us there, returning to the years after the Civil War, to tell the story of this family, and the strange turns that its personal relationships take over that century. The first half of the book is a bit slow-going, as we weave through the lives of all these Howlands. But we settle on William Howland, a widower who, in the 1920s, hires a young mixed-race (but essentially African-American) woman to tend to his massive old house. The relationship is deeper and more complex than just employer/employee, a fact made more obvious by the birth of three children. Abigail Howland is William's grand-daughter. The tone of her own life is formed by the history of this manor house, and the usually gentle behavior of her grandfather. There are assumptions about what is going on, everybody knows these kids are William's, but most people are willing to let that go, as long as the details remain ambiguous. The explosive moment comes when these details become public knowledge, printed in the papers, and a factor in the election of a governor. Abigail chooses between the vaguely racist political philosophy of her husband, the mixed-race family from which she springs, and her devotion to that family. She is no angel, determined to make the town pay for its hypocrisy. But also isn't entirely sympathetic to the dilemma her mixed-race cousins face in a racially-charged world (recall that this book came out in the days of the Civil Rights movement in the early 1960s). Grau's story, particularly in its second half, is subtle and powerful. It is compelling literature, and a convincing doorway to the cultural complex that is Southern life and tradition. It's certainly more complex than a Neil Young song. The South, sometimes, and particularly to a Northerner (like your faithful reader), can feel like a foreign country. With compelling books like Grau's, we can get a glimpse of its complexities and its beauty.
(For this book, Grau was awarded the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.)