The Heaven of Mercury (2002)by Brad Watson

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Heaven of Mercury (2002)

by Brad Watson

Mercury, Mississippi

Mississippi: 16/19

     Living in California, it is easy to lose track of the relative size of places like it and New York to places like Alabama and Mississippi.  For example, the largest city in Mississippi is Jackson and it has a population of 146k.  In California, Jackson would be the 40th largest city, between Visalia and Victorville.  The total population of Mississippi, just about 3 million, is smaller than the CITY of Los Angeles, let alone the county or metropolitan statistical area.   Of course, the founding fathers foresaw this, which is why we are saddled with a political system which allows areas like the deep south and rural Midwest to put their candidates into the Presidency at the expense of places like California and New York.

     For places like Mississippi, it's not a question of the city/town/rural distinction of more populated areas, rather it is a question of small towns and rural areas.  Even the books putatively mapped onto urban areas in Mississippi take place in rural settings.   The Heaven of Mercury is a pure example of the small-town novel, nominated for the National Book Award for fiction back in 2002 about a local newspaper editor and his lifetime of unrequited love for a childhood almost-sweetheart.

    I've observed before that the use of a map to plot the titles in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America presupposes certain kind of plots and narrators.  None of the book in the Mississippi chapter split their temporality between Mississippi and some other place.  Characters who leave Mississippi leave the novel.  This means you have a choice between people coming back from some other place and people who never leave.   Within that category Mississippi is almost unique in that NONE of the novels are about people coming back from some other place and ALL of the books are about people who never leave. 

  At least, with our newspaper editor character in The Heaven of Mercury we have a literate protagonist. 

Finus, the protagonist, is, I think, the most sophisticated of any of the protagonists in the Mississippi titles.

Queen Sugar (2014) by Natalie Baszile

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Queen Sugar (2014)

by Natalie Baszile

St. James Parish, Louisiana

Louisiana: 24/30

  Cotton gets most of the press when you consider deep south agriculture, but sugar is part of the story as well.  If you don't know the story of sugar and the role it played in advancing the slavery-industrial complex in the 18th and 19th century, you can't grasp the significance of a novel about a young African American woman who suprise-inherits a sugar plantation in Louisiana, but to be fair, neither does the protagonist- a native Californian who uproots her daughter in the aftermath of the untimely death of her husband and decides to make a go of it in the deep south.

 Queen Sugar is pitched somewhere between "issue novel" and "chick lit" with elements that hint at something deeper with plot points that sound like they were written for television (Queen Sugar was adapted into a movie for Oprah's OWN network).  Charley, the protagonist, is primarily concerned with survival and to a lesser degree with the issues faced by her own family, specifically those of Ralph, her ne'er-do-well younger brother, the product of a childhood fling between her father and a local, mentally unstable girl during high school.  Ralph has led a life filled with issues- taken from his mother in Louisiana to live with Charley and their father in California, being returned to Louisiana for being to difficult, dropping out of college a couple semesters short of his college degree (in Civil Engineering?!?!), succumbing to drug addiction in Phoenix of all places, losing his wife to an overdose, abandoning her body and taking his son back to Louisiana.  It wasn't hard to tell where Ralph was headed.

  I enjoyed Queen Chapters for the portions that actually dealt with the process of farming sugar cane- after reading endless books about cotton farming, it was a welcome shift.  I also thought the plot was more interesting than the book Baszile wrote, but I can see where she was aiming.

Joe (1991) by Larry Brown

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Joe (1991)

by Larry Brown

Oxford, Mississippi

Mississippi: 15/19

   I chuckled when I read the jacket copy, which compares author Larry Brown to Faulkner, Welty and O'Connor in the same sentence.  What you mean he writes like three of the five non-African-American authors that matter in the deep south?  If you look up the author online you will soon see that he is associated with a genre called "grit-lit."  The Good Reads page is a mess and lists titles from Faulkner to O'Connor and everything in between.  To me, it sounds like an attempt to rebrand Southern Gothic for the "modern" (aka 1990s) period.   The prevalence of freaks, and freak like behavior in literature from the deep south is unique within American literature, sure every state and region has its dysfunctional families, but the patriarch of the dysfunctional family in this book really takes the cake.  Calling him a knock-down, drag-out alcoholic doesn't begin to do his depravity justice.