The New South's Edge

Page 23 March–April 2009 The New South’s Edge Michael Wolfe New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2008 Edited by ZZ Packer Algonquin Books http://www.workman.com/algonquin 428 pages; paper, $14.95 ZZ Packer introduces New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2008 in “The Double Indemnity of the South,” explaining the difference between southerners and Southerners, or the Old South and the New South, in part justifying or reconciling with her selections. She writes, In selecting the stories for this collection, I wasn’t surprised that I found myself drawn to the stories by southerners over Southerners…But I was surprised that I found myself attracted to stories that managed to straddle the southern-Southern divide , stories which paradoxically evoked the mythic South as well as the somewhat bastard South. Packer’s introduction offers a lens through which to read this anthology, but who really reads whole anthologies anyway?And how do we read anthologies? One story at a time, straight through, hen-pecking this author or that title on our commute? If you’re anything like me, you read a couple of stories at a time, because they are so good, and were deemed “best” by an editor who we imagine did nothing but read literary journals for an entire year. After all, don’t great stories force us to linger before we give ourselves over to another story’s world? New Stories from the South is no exception; its stories are, for the most part, magnificent individual achievements, and leave us wanting to close the book after reading one or two at a time, only to pick it up a day later to see what else awaits us. Packer’s notion of “double indemnity” is first and most clearly seen in Pinckney Benedict’s wonderfully spooky “Bridge of Sighs.” A young boy narrates as he tags along with and helps his father, whose role is to find and kill diseased cattle during an epizootic. The boy detaches himself and his father from his father’s work, referring to the uniform his father wears as “The Exterminator,” and explains away any responsibility: “My father didn’t do the killing. The Exterminator did the killing. It kept the demons off of him, and it did the killing for him, and it kept him clean and safe inside it, no matter what went on outside. He was like Jesus, in a way.” The boy is left to tell stories and hunt for mud puppies with Scurry, a “scarecrow” looking farmer, while his dad finds and kills thirteen of Scurry’s cattle with a hammer-like “humane killer.” The surface of Benedict’s story is deceptively simple, but the young narrator’s stories and worldview are what give this story its profundity. Bendedict’s story is at once apocalyptic, biblical, surreal and current. Most of the stories in this collection are magnificent individual achievements. While the “double indemnity” may be seen in many individual stories, it is even more apparent in Packer’s arrangement of stories, constantly jarring us from the new to the old and back again. Reading Charlie Smith’s “Albemarle” vis-à-vis Jennifer Moses ’s “Child of God” highlights this juxtaposition. In Smith’s story, a young female narrator runs away from home and is picked up by Jimmy Porcell, “a large fat man with freckles like impressions from rusty nailheads patted onto his face.” The story and characters recall Lolita and Humbert Humbert in the dirty South, as Jimmy Porcell shows the young girl photographs of naked dead boys he claims to have taken while working at a funeral home. Both of their plans get botched after Jimmy Porcell wrecks his car, and their clumsy efforts fail to get them out of the small, chatty town before anyone notices. Moses’s story immediately throws us into St. Jude’s Home, chock full of ex-whores and junkies, many of whom are HIV positive. The story seems to be set in the 80s or perhaps even more recently, in pre-Katrina Louisiana, and reads like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting cum Symposium held in a half-saved, halfdoomed halfway house, while...