Volume 36, Number 2 · February 16, 1989
Intruders in the Dust
By Robert Towers
Paris Trout
by Pete Dexter
Random House, 306 pp., $17.95
Shine Hawk
by Charlie Smith
Paris Review Editions, 367 pp., $17.95
As the South gives way to the Sunbelt, southern novelists are having to reckon with a steady erosion of the regional distinctiveness that formerly provided not only the surface but the main subject of their art. The softening of overt racial injustice and violence has been accompanied by increased racial separatism and the consequent loss of the old intimacies—deplorably unequal as they were—between black and white. Meanwhile, over the last thirty years, a vast population of blacks has been driven by the technology of modern agriculture from a rooted if impoverished existence on the land to a rootless and equally impoverished existence in the ghettos of Detroit, Chicago, and New York. Poor whites have moved from their dog-run shacks into rusting trailers, where they now get the old-time religion from television sets, while the first families of Charleston and Savannah have—eagerly or resignedly—surrendered their houses to a thriving tourist industry. The Atlanta airport, rivaled only by those of Chicago and Los Angeles in congestion, confusion, and inconvenience, presents a far more telling image of the contemporary South than the small-town courthouse, now air-conditioned, or the white-columned plantation house, now adjacent to a shopping mall or surrounded by oil rigs.
Review, 2904 words
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