Monday Review: Louisiana Charm

I have a little book club. It's really a close assembly of my friends who have agreed to share books they want to read with one another. During the first session (6 months for 6 six girls), each girl chooses a book and hosts a meeting. We had a lot of fun linking books with meetings... We read Angela Carters' Burning Your Boats for a themed Halloween meeting, D.H. Lawrence's Mrs. Chatterley's Lover for an elegant Christmas meeting, W. P. Young's The Shack for our January Pajama Party, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss for a Valentines' Day themed meeting, a fantastic Russian tea after reading Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and finally, we read Coraline by Neil Gaiman and met under the covering of a sheet tent to relive our fun childhood memories. For summer, we teamed up, two girls per the three summer months, to choose a graphic novel, a chic lit book, and a non-fiction title. We read Neil Gaiman's Season of Mists from his Sandman series and combined the book with Coraline to discuss Gaiman's short works.

This month, we had a beach meeting for our chic lit pick... Loraine Despres' The Bad Behavior of Belle Cantrell.

Briefly, the story takes place in Gentry, Louisiana during the 1920s and focuses on a young Southern widow named Belle raising a teenage daughter on her late husband's farm. Two years after his death (which took place on the night of his homecoming after a long tour overseas during the war) Belle feels prepared to move on with her life. She hacks off her hair (the "bob" had just appeared on the hip scene) and starts a new series of complications... dealing with her reliable farmhand getting run off by the prejudice of white men, feeling forced to accept a new, smarmy farm manager at the recommendation of a lazily corrupt sheriff, falling in love with a Jewish store manager, and combating a freshly organized chapter of the KKK. All the while, though she tries to maintain her Southern niceties and rules of lady-like, good-old-girl behavior, she finds that following her heart seems easier and truer to who she is than following the rules.

This book is a little harder to find than it was when it was first published. The few times I've found it lately, though it belongs in the fiction/literature section, is in the Bargain shelves. It is the prequel to what was briefly a bestselling novel (and more easily located in book stores even now) titled The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc (Sissy is Belle's granddaughter). I guess our trends are pretty predictable... we love a One Hit Wonder without much openness to other explorations a writer/artist cares to express.

This book will probably be most enjoyed most by those who want to nod in remembrance and agreement. It's a novel for other good-old-Southern gals or those who have witnessed the magic of New Orleans and the elegant warmth of Louisiana. I couldn't help reminiscing on my travels in Louisiana with Anya. The book mentions places that I've seen... I could smell the powdered sugar melting on a heavy white plate of beignets and the thick, earthy chicory in the café au lait from Café du Monde. I could hear the train whistle and feel the floor rumble from the railway engine galloping on the tracks outside the shops in Hammond. With all the books about New York and Nothern America or the West, I've only had a chance to read a handful of stories about Louisiana and Virginia. It was nice to travel back to some of my favorite places and fondest memories.

For others who have not gone to these fantastic and quaint areas, the appeal of this book should be to relax. It's not exactly Shakespeare, but it's light and honest. There are some very personally real and feminine moments... the urge to cut your hair and shake up your image after an emotional blow, fighting with attractions to both the right and wrong kinds of men, worrying about how your children see you as a mother or a person, internal battles of inadequacy in the faces of those we love most, and the passion of feeling significant as a woman and a person.

One of the best moments that I came across in the novel is Despres' imaginative picture of women hearing for the first time that they are finally recognized as voters. It also adds a little depth to Belle's character giving her some conviction to back up her "bad behavior". I wanted to be there in the room hugging or kissing a total stranger due to feeling wrapped up in a moment of such victorious happiness.

You can argue that there's not much depth to the other characters or that the writing, in places, gets to be redundant. Loraine Despres' writing repetoire largely includes screenwriting... a style that requires one to write every little thing that is seen, that actually happens, while expecting the talent of directors and actors to bring across the meaning, the reality. In considering this, I could see this story as a mini-series on TV and not wanting to necessarily change the channel. The tale itself works for wanting to kick back and simply feel entertained or reminded of youthful romping. This is still decent fun... reminds me of daydreams we have that we know can't happen as we imagine it.

Despres attempts to at least start a discussion on a handful of hot topic issues. Her stand against slavery is very honorable and very familiar. The novel initiates this talk with a pillaged church built and run by her own farm manager. He had been using texts outside the Bible to put ideas of equality in the heads of his fellow slaves (specifically W. E. DuBois). Some ignorant "rednecks" tear the place apart and, no matter how Belle pleads with her manager to stay or demands the sheriff to do something about the terrorizing, the slave picks up his family and moves during the night. Belle sends him some letters of recommendation to a new employer as well as money given to her by her friends to help him and his family survive. However, the situation remains as it is; no one who wronged him seemed to learn anything, and he seems worse off even. Yes, he has a job and can take care of his family, but the friendship and affection he received from being employed by Belle is lost entirely. His new employer treats him like a low-class employee and that's how what we know of him ends.

Belle's love interest is a little too good to be true. He is described as having some serious emotional darkness... his wife apparently has cheated on him, he has trouble recovering from things that remind him of the war (he was also a soldier), and putting these things together makes it impossible to trust his own feelings about others. Magically, Belle seems to be the one to open the trap doors in his heart. There's not but so much detail on her incantation to make the voodoo work. After she gives in to her physical attraction to him the day women received the right to vote (she got caught up in the moment and kissed him right on the mouth) he doesn't speak to her for a week, shows up at a party in New Orleans, says to her plainly, "Dance with me," and it's all over. All of a sudden, he starts to pursue her. Don't get me wrong, I like him, but it's because he's a fantasy and unlike anything that could actually be... he suddenly has fetching one liners, satisfies her physical needs unlike anything she's ever imagined, and in the end, he divorces officially from his wife and brings his non-Jewish girlfriend to meet his family... It's all too good.

Belle's daughter has a boyfriend with whom the daughter is very in love. They have similar interests, values, and stars in their eyes for one another. He and Belle have some pretty typical parent/child's love interest rivalry. This doesn't receive but so much development other than Belle taking down her usual comic guard against his wishes to marry her daughter until he helps her against a violent struggle with the KKK who targets her Jewish friends. Not the most graceful change in their relationship. The situation is similar between Belle and her mother-in-law, Miss Effie. Miss Effie is the quintessential Southern Lady and lets Belle know it everytime Belle wears the wrong clothes, says the wrong thing, makes the impolite assumption, etc. Without a progression to follow, Miss Effie tells Belle close to the end that she's proud of her daughter-in-law and her sense of right and wrong... I personally would have liked to have seen more into that particular relationship.

More interesting is Belle's relationship with her own daughter. Belle is protective of her and aggressively so at the moment Bourreé LeBlanc, the burly sleezy farm manager, is hired on and starts winking at people. She hears herself saying things to her daughter about staying out of trouble, but then the reader has an opportunity to see how it works when the table is turned. Her daughter catches Belle making-out in a closet at the New Orleans party with the Jewish store manager. It takes a morning café au lait in the French Quarter to explain herself to her daughter as a woman rather than the mother that advises her child for her own good. This relationship encounters many growing pains and generates several conversations that satisfies the need of some readers to see some character development.

But character development, as I already said, is not Despres' priority. Instead, she provides a relatively realistic portrait of a small-town Southern community. The information Despres offers about the pretty large number of people she introduces is about all you really ever know about these neighbors and groups in such places. You know they are there, and you know who their Mama is, but you don't know all the time what they believe, what matters to them, and whether or not you can trust them. Closeness is not the point. The point of this sort of community is to be polite, have a pretty porch, and make sure there's something cold to drink in the ice box for company.

Despres most certainly captures that aspect of Southern living.

So, writing style and choices aside, one can evaluate her in terms of apparent goals. I don't think she was out to write The Great American Novel. I think she was writing a grateful tableau for the place she considers home. Though originally from Chicago (another place that features briefly with great affection in her book as the hometown of Belle's love interest), she grew up in the heat of Louisiana. She was the only Jewish girl in a Bible-belt town. She borrowed from this aspect of her own life to create the Rubinstein family for this novel. In the very specific episode when Abe Rubinstein suffers a cardiac event forcing him to bed rest and the town churches gather together and pray for him, its reflection displays a chapter of Despres' life in Louisiana. Her perspective on that experience, as a Jewish person, is of gratitude and respect. It seems that the goodness from that action, in her opinion, played a large role in her own father's recovery. Likewise, the episode of the KKK group attacking the Rubinsteins forcing the family to defend itself comes out of Despres' family history (her bedroom growing up was shot up with bullet holes from the incident which occured during the time her great grandfather was living there).

As someone who enjoys stories about real people, I appreciate and enjoy what this book has contributed to my collection of stories. May this Southern tale kick off the book club's pick (an anthology of oral histories recorded for publication) for the July meeting.

(photos from www.booksamillion.com, www.discoverblackheritage.com, and www.illinoisauthors.org/)