A FEAST OF SNAKES
by HARRY CREWS
177 pages. Atheneum. $7.95.
Flannery O'Connor, the late short-story master from Georgia, once noted that "any fiction that comes out of the South is going to be considered grotesque by the Northern critic, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be considered realistic." At the time—the '50s—it was a convenient arrangement: regionalism provided neat categories for prides and prejudices. But the postwar boundaries could not hold.
Suddenly, it seemed, everybody was writing about his relatives as if they were not only grotesque but absurdly, even proudly grotesque.
Georgia-born Harry Crews has pushed this proposition about as far as it can go. In such short novels as Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit, The Hawk Is Dying and Car (in which a man eats a car), Crews customized gothic cliches into literary hot-rods. A Feast of Snakes is his most outlandish vehicle to date. Set in Mystic, Ga., site of an annual rattlesnake hunt, the book gathers its atmosphere from the frenzies and violence associated with religious primitivism.
In Mystic, even the high school football team is known as the Rattlers. Joe Lon Mackey, once one of the team's great running backs, now lives in a trailer with his pregnant wife and two kids. His days of glory behind him, he sells whisky to the locals while his daddy trains fighting dogs and his mad sister watches TV round the clock. It is a world in which boredom and brutality are kinds of celebration, where "men were maimed without malice, sometimes—often even—in friendship."
The maimings—athletic, psychological and sexual—occur without letup. Their culmination is the madness and chaos of the rattlesnake hunt itself, with the implication that the ancient, once powerful symbol of the snake has been so trivialized it no longer has the capacity to heal. As in past novels, Crews gets carried away with his own wildly fertile imagination and verbal gifts. His new book is full of brilliant descriptions and characters attempting to kick and gouge their way through some back door to salvation. The problem is that there is too little distinction between the truly grotesque and the gratuitously bizarre.
R.Z. Sheppard