Inhabiting Contemporary Southern and Appalachian Literature: Region and Place in the Twenty-First Century

3. Representing Urban Appalachia: Fred Chappell’s The Gaudy Place

3 Representing Urban Appalachia Fred Chappell’s The Gaudy Place Place is that, which is the same in different moments to different existent things, when their relations of co-existence with certain other existents, which are supposed to continue fixed from one of those moments to the other, agree entirely together. Bertrand Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz The spirit of the place is poetic, as is the spirit of any place when you come closer to the heart of it. I can’t think of any book of real worth, except maybe Dante’s Inferno, that says, underneath, “This is a horrible, lousy place, nobody should live here, and the people are dumb” [laughs]. On the other hand, every book that deals with place is also a criticism of place, but not simply a wholesale thrashing. Fred Chappell, Interview with the author On the dust jacket of the first edition of Fred Chappell’s fourth novel, The Gaudy Place (1973), is a bare room, naked except for a table and two empty chairs. On the table sits a napkin dispenser, a bottle of whiskey, a tumbler (empty except for two large cubes of ice), and an ashtray containing two crushed-out fags and one burning low. A single door stands at the far wall, the light beyond the glass panes inked in the same rich golden hue as Chappell’s name. Is this scene the Ace or Juanita’s Place, Gimlet Street bars where the boy-hustler Arkie works his two-bit cons? The Big Bunny, another seedy dive where Oxie informs Clemmie he no longer can afford to pimp her? The Brass Rail, a swank, new, carpeted downtown establishment where Ted Pape makes his upwardly mobile political maneuverings? The back room of some elitist country club where the aristocratic Zebulon Johns Mackie bullies city leaders into submitting to his crooked business Representing Urban Appalachia: Fred Chappell’s The Gaudy Place · 67 schemes? Probably it is all of these places, for it is the collective scene(s) of the book itself. The Gaudy Place essentially is a meditation on place (the small fictional Appalachian city of Braceboro, North Carolina), which separates it conceptually from Chappell’s first three novels. To be sure, milieu is important when considering those earlier novels, especially since they share, with some varied and notable exceptions, very similar rural western North Carolina settings. However, Chappell’s interests during the compositions of those books lay more in working out the psycho-philosophical complexities of his young male protagonists than in relating an authentic sense of culture and community. In The Gaudy Place, as is the case in novels such as Ivo Andric’s The Bridge on the Drina and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, the book’s setting also serves as its dominant character, with the various personalities contributing distinct aspects and avenues of interpretation to the collective identity of Braceboro. Like Mary Lee Settle ’s Blood Tie, the book frequently switches characters and perspectives, which, in turn, episodically construct the small Appalachian municipality that serves as both the novel’s backdrop and its central subject, defining and defined by the people and objects that exist in its space. Using locale or place as its guiding point of inquiry, this chapter reads Chappell’s novel as a place-based social text that critiques its setting through cross-section and narrative-advancing representations of its socioeconomically disparate denizens. After presenting significant details of the novel’s composition, early reviews, and structural qualities, I move into a largely theoretical meditation on place, underscoring its significance in southern Appalachian literature, how it is specifically portrayed in terms of urban milieus, and the way in which convincing characterization is essential to its construction. The consideration of characterization leads quite logically into an examination of the book’s major characters in terms of the various subenvironments in which they function—how individuals operate in their immediate place, which in turn affects seemingly unrelated events and, in fact, the entire city itself. Finally, I argue that The Gaudy Place, with its interest in a small, closed society, marks a career-changing authorial shift from an existential, philosophical, and intellectually disciplined mode of prose expression in his first three novels to a more humane, comic, and community-based style of writing—paving the way for the more approachable Appalachia-based Kirkman stories 68 · Part II. A Matter of...