The Green Suit (review)

was the pictures that were getting smaUer, she might easUy have been talking about them in regard to JamesAgee. Writing about film, Agee, the prose stylist, often overshadowed his subjects. I should think that film criticism has never come closer to attaining the mantle of true art than it does here. (CF) The Green Suit by Dwight Allen Algonquin, 2000, 288 pp., $22.95 Dwight Allen's first novel, The Green Suit, is a deUghtful read. The protagonist, PeterSackrider, is a comic antihero whose vices we can too readUy recognize in ourselves—that is, if we were haU so honest. The novel comprises eleven individual stories: the first five and the last story are narrated by Peter; the rest are narrated by a variety of voices, primarily female. "Deferment," the first story, sets a pattern for Peter's personaUty that wUl repeat itself throughout the novel. He is cowardly. For example, he resorts to handwritten notes to break up with his girlfriend and later to send condolences for her brother, who dies in Vietnam. He is drawn to inteUigent, ambitious women such as Lizzie Burford, who is a straight-A student, but his lust leads him to lesser women such as Cheryl, who would "screw pretty much anything with two legs." He is also drawn to a male mentor, a sawmiU hand named Red, who possesses aU the verve that Peter lacks. Other colorfuUy drawn male mentors appear throughout the novel— Elvin, the buUding superintendent in "The Green Suit"; Hal Hazelett, a newspaper reporter in "The Hazeletts' Dog"; Larry Hale, a down-and-out, alcohoUc, divorced father in "Succor"; and Harvey Blum, a former college professor in "A Bed of Ice." Each of these men show Peter what he is, what he lacks, or what he could become. Elvin, who first appears in a flashy green suit, is, unlike Peter, a hip, transplanted Southerner who at least knows how to treat women honorably. Hal Hazelett, a friend from Peter's teenaged years, has fierce poUt ical convictions and the courage to live by them. Larry Hale, who foreshadows the divorced father that Peter wiU become, drunkenly sums up Peter's assessment of himself: "And you, Peter Sackrider, saying how you're just a bag of shit and lust and cowardice." Harvey Blum, Peter's former mentor at an all-male coUege in Tennessee, is a washed-up writer who bitterly laments the present poUticaUy correct academic environment that prohibits sex with female students. Peter is more than either his assessment of himself or what these mentors show him to be, or else we, the readers, would not be so irresistibly drawn to him. Just as the men in the novel serve to highUght Peter's weaknesses , the women serve to highUght his strengths (or, at least, his charms). He is a faithful husband (for longer than one might expect) and an attentive father. He is lazy but has the good fortune to inherit a stock portfoUo , which keeps his vague writing ambitions afloat. Peter has his nurturing side; he is sure to pack nutritious lunches for his girlfriends as they go off to school or to real jobs. As a divorced father, he is careful to maintain a close, loving relationship The Missouri Review · 195 with his son, Louis. When his sister, Alex, falls apart completely in her early forties, Peter is there for her. Each of the eleven stories that make up The Green Suit is tightly written, without sounding a single false note. The transition from a single narrator in Part I to multiple narrators in Part ? is somewhat jarring . The reader, who has grown fond of Peter, with aU his flaws, may feel sUghtly disappointed to lose his particular take on things. However, Peter never recedes too far into the background, and soon we are happy to see what these other characters think of him. OveraU, The Green Suit, with its mercUess honesty and wülingness to forgive human faUibUity, represents the best of the comic spirit. (NS) Look Back All the Green Valley by Fred Chappell Picador, 1999, 288 pp., $24 Northerners may be forgiven for wondering whence aU the huUabaloo when Southerners rattle on about...