Still in Print: The Southern Novel Today

James Wilcox: Heavenly Days

James Wilcox Heavenly Days Scott Romine A Biographical Sketch With the 2003 publication of Heavenly Days, James Wilcox returned South from a three-novel hiatus in New York City. The move followed Wilcox’s own migration southward from New York City, where he had lived for nearly three decades, to teach creative writing at Mississippi State University and, later, Louisiana State University. In returning South, Wilcox also returned to one of the richest literary territories in recent southern letters. The fifth of his novels to be set in Tula Springs, Louisiana, Heavenly Days constitutes a homecoming in more ways than one. Not only does it mark a literal return to Wilcox’s home ground; it also continues a theme—the search for home in a world of exiles— prominent in his work since his first novel, Modern Baptists, appeared in 1983. Modern Baptists is the story of Bobby Pickens, amateur theologian and assistant manager of the Sonny Boy Bargain Store. The novel’s title comes from the church for modern Baptists Mr. Pickens imagines opening after he receives his “preaching diploma.” Devoid of “old-fashioned ranting and raving” and committed to “reason and logic,” the church of modern Baptists will appeal to Baptists “sick to death of hell and sin being stuffed down their gullets every Sunday” (145). Like all of Wilcox’s novels, Modern Baptists resists easy summary ; multiple and sometimes perplexing plot lines reflect the bewildered state in which characters typically find themselves. Attempting, as Mr. Pickens does, to formulate moral, aesthetic, and political codes that will impose order on anarchy , Wilcox’s characters remain mostly mired in anarchy, both literally and figuratively, the church for modern Baptists never opens its door. But however comical, ineffective, fraudulent, or even mean-spirited such efforts might appear, they are never fully contemptible. Nor are the characters who generate them. Even Mr. Pickens, whose entrapment in “bitterness and defeat” causes him to fail his brother in crucial ways, is able, finally, to recognize in his brother’s “eyes black with pain, a story that was somehow like his own” (239). Wilcox followed Modern Baptists in 1985 with North Gladiola, the story of Ethyl Mae Coco and her quixotic efforts to bring culture to Tula Springs with her classical quartet. Unable to orchestrate either musicians or her family, Mrs. 190 Scott Romine Coco finds that her efforts to articulate a self within a social world flounder— not least, she finally recognizes, because of her own inflexible and self-serving moral codes. With Miss Undine’s Living Room (1987), Wilcox’s narrative style deviated further from traditional plot structures. Called “maddeningly digressive ” by Marianne Gingher and “Dickensian in its wealth of eccentric characters ” by Michiko Kakutani, Miss Undine’s Living Room follows Olive Mackey through the labyrinthine corridors of Tula Springs politics, both municipal and sexual. Sort of Rich (1989) tells the more economical story of Gretchen Peabody , a Manhattan émigré who finds herself, through a chance marriage to a Tula Springs native, living in a town she finds to be not as “Faulknerian” as she had hoped. Frustrated in her attempt to find “real values in this remote hamlet where everyone wasn’t caught up in all the hype that had made her life in New York such a burden” (23), and to fit within a household whose logic escapes her, Gretchen remains in Tula Springs after her husband’s death and ultimately finds her place within it. With his next novel, Polite Sex (1991), Wilcox turned to New York City for his setting, albeit using several characters who hail from Tula Springs. New York would also serve as the setting for Guest of a Sinner (1993) and Plain and Normal (1998). The change in locale occasioned certain changes in Wilcox’s work—not surprisingly for a self-described “novelist of manners” with a gift for capturing the nuances of distinctive social milieus. The blue-state ethos of New York stands in sharp contrast to the red-state environment of Tula Springs, where even modern Baptists attend Bible study. New themes emerged, including the subject of homosexuality in Plain and Normal. Even so there is a strong continuity in Wilcox’s work. The humor remains, although it has tended to acquire a more melancholy edge as his career has progressed. Like Flannery O’Connor, his most important precursor, Wilcox writes from a perspective informed by a Catholic worldview, although one decidedly less severe and judgmental than that of his predecessor. O’Connor...