Blog on the Lillypad
Sunday, February 22, 2004
 | Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan
Whew! What a book! I've never read anything like this before. Loosely based on the lynching of 14 year old Emmet Till in 1955 (for whistling at a white woman), Nordan's novel is as far away from a crime novel as you can get. A grim and bizarre comedy of callous, drunk, and stupid people, the telling of this tale took me to new destinations in odd but often hilarious ways of telling a story. From the fourth grade teacher who takes her students on a field trip to a mortuary to watch an embalming, to the drunk, befuddled, savvy, vicious, and remorseful Gregg who decides to murder his family except for his eldest daughter (lest she miss her wedding), the residents of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi abound in eccentric, twisted, and macabre individuals (most of them drunk most of the time). |
The hard realities of racial segregation and deep poverty and ignorance keep one foot of the novel in reality. The murder of fourteen year old Bobo is just barely made tragic. My initial impression that this book would concentrate upon racial injustice was incorrect. Wolf Whistle is very much a book about the way things were without making any attempt at analysis. This is one reason that it's so striking and believable, in spite of a certain bizarre style of narrative. At times the story breaks down. Nordan seems a bit too impressed with style, and when he slips the narrative perspective into a buzzard's consciousness, I felt that he was pandering to his own ego or to the demands to be self conscious in a literary sense. Overall the narrative holds the reader tightly to itself, but there were a couple rare places where a savvy editor could have lopped off an entire page and spared the reader from an authorial excess.
If you're a Christian Fundamentalist/Evangelical reading this, I think it's a great book that depicts minds of evil: drunken minds, self centered minds, pompous minds, trivial minds, silly and self deceived minds. But if you're squeamish or balk at occasional spurts of blue language or sexual reference (though no explicit sex), look elsewhere. There's no mystery here: you know who commits the crime. There's no forensic story at all. This is a novel of who did it and what they were thinking and how the different residents of the small community were effected by the impact of the tragedy.
