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Review by Laurie Parker
Forget Uncle Remus. Forget Walt Disney. If you want the real song of the South, read Lewis Nordan. Music of the Swamp, Wolf Whistle, and The Sharpshooter Blues -- see a pattern here? And those are only some of Nordan's titles. The real music lies between the book covers, in the writing. Now Nordan has composed Lightning Song, his seventh book, which is as lyrical, memorable, bittersweet, and haunting as a gospel hymn heard drifting through the window on a summer Sunday evening.
In Lightning Song, as he has done so memorably in other works, Nordan returns to his native Mississippi to tell the story of a young boy going through the growing pains of adolescence, learning about life, love, and family. Towheaded, freckle-faced Leroy Dearman is in many ways a typical boy: he fights with his sister, both worships and loathes his parents, and discovers sex by sneaking peeks at the "poor deranged woman" in his uncle's dirty magazine. (He gets indignant about "the practical joker who popped in on this perfectly nice lady and took her picture while she was getting dressed in clothes ten sizes too small for her.") There are some odd aspects to Leroy's life, including the fact that he lives on a llama farm and that his father is a one-armed man called Swami Don (mysteriously nicknamed for a man who ran a salvage business down in the Delta). But as he enters the summer of his twelfth year, life seems pretty simple and well within Leroy's control. All of this changes the day a sporty white convertible pulls up the dusty drive and parks in front of the house. Out of the car vaults Uncle Harris, movie-star handsome with a carpetbag in his hand.
Uncle Harris brings with him glamour, excitement, nightly parties with "grog rations," and a constant feeling that something wonderful is just about to happen. Leroy, his sisters, and his mother are all besotted with Uncle Harris, and only Swami Don seems to notice that his brother, although loveable, is an irresponsible freeloader.
Because Swami Don mounts his tractor and heads out to the fields each morning while Elsie minds the house and Uncle Harris stays home to laze around and read one of his countless newspapers, Elsie and Uncle Harris wind up spending a great deal of time together. This, as might be expected in such a situation, leads to trouble. As Leroy begins experiencing his own new feelings of sexual desire, a lightning song blasting through his veins and ringing in his ears, both blessing and burning him, he notices a similar reaction occurring between his mother and his uncle. His child's heart is set in conflict with his maturing sensibilities, and Leroy's world is turned upside down.
Like the other natural phenomena of the farm, lightning is almost a character in the story, acting as a deus ex machina in the Dearmans' lives. Their farmhouse is topped by a lightning rod, and during summer storms, balls of electricity bounce down the chimney to dance across their hearth like household gods. Although the thunderous rumblings become more and more stern and the fiery visitations become more and more spectacular, the Dearmans don't get the message until one night when the storms building both inside and outside the house reach hurricane strength. The emotions of the household act like a superconductor, pulling down lighting that explodes over the family and exposes like an x-ray their flaws, faults, and wounds. Young Leroy, caught betwixt and between in the turbulence, is the human lightning rod who finally draws his family back together. Lightning Song is a crackling good story, full of writing both so natural and so amazing that you can almost smell the ozone in the air.
Laurie Parker writes frequently on modern Southern fiction.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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