SIRONIA, TEXAS (1,731 pp.)—Mad/son Cooper—Houghton Mifflin ($10).
Time was, in Texas, when a man didn't have anything big to say that a shooting iron couldn't say better; but those days seem gone forever. In the last 30 years, a cloud of literary and artistic activity has been gathering over the Southwest, and in the last ten days it has grown large enough to look like the beginnings of a regional renaissance.
One of the newest novelists to arrive on the Texas landscape is Madison Cooper of Waco—and he has come in like an oil well and come in big. Novelist Cooper is crude, all right, and he is such a wasteful gusher that it seems scarcely worth while capping the flow between the covers of a book; but he spews out so much of the rich stuff that he is very likely to flood the U.S. book market in the weeks before Christmas—if he doesn't scare most of the customers on to higher ground.
Sironia, Texas is apparently the longest novel by an American writer ever to be published. Its 840,000 words cover 1,731 pages of medium-fine print. It costs $10 in the regular two-volume edition, and it can also be had in a de luxe $15 printing. Author Cooper, a 59-year-old bachelor, took eleven years to write it, during and after business hours at the desk where he manages a family real-estate fortune (TIME, April 7).
"I have a freak memory," Cooper says. "I can remember indefinitely anything that is not important." In his opus, Cooper recalls almost everything unimportant that happened in Sironia, a pseudonymous Texas town (Cooper has always lived in Waco) in the first 20 years of the century. He tells the important things too; but with the gift of the true gossip for pure indiscrimination he can tell about a rape in the same cozy tone he uses to describe a family evening at home —and, in Sironia, one seems to have been as common as the other.
In fact, to judge from Sironia, Texas in those days must have been a dang sight wilder than even now. In the lives of Cooper's 30-odd major characters, there occur a flood, several murders and suicides, and a castration party. One whorehouse burns down, one Negro is burned alive, one changeling is introduced into a childbed.
Girls are seduced and others are beaten; at times it seems as though the streets of Sironia must be paved with female teeth. Crowbars are swung in labor strife, horsewhips in political campaigns. Sex-crazed old women corner fresh-faced youths in locked bedrooms. Blackmail is a commonplace, miscegenation comes almost as natural as breathing, and the highest ambition of mankind, it would seem, is to own a real, live, spangly N'awlins "hoah."
In short, Sironia, Texas is just the same old small-town story, as it has been told in 50 sensationalized bestsellers—only this time it's in Texas, and so there's much, much more of it. Also, there may be still more to come. Says Author Cooper: "Well, I figure I've still got about three more novels in me."
THE DEVIL RIDES OUTSIDE (596 pp.)—John H. Griffin—Smiths ($4).