I remember my dad telling me…

by DRM

When Preacher stepped out of the ele­va­tor, he saw a man in a beige suit and pink west­ern shirt sit­ting in a swivel chair behind a huge desk, framed against a glass wall that looked out onto the bay. On the desk was a big clear plas­tic jar of green-and-blue candy sticks, each striped stick wrapped in cel­lo­phane. His hips swelled out at the belt line and gave the sense that he was melt­ing in his chair. He had sandy hair and a small Irish mouth that was down­turned at the cor­ners. His skin was dusted with liver spots, some of them dark, almost pur­ple around the edges, as though his soul exuded sick­ness through his pores.

Rain Gods: A Novel
James Lee Burke

I remem­ber my dad telling me one sum­mer that he was teach­ing a course that included James Lee Burke’s nov­els, some­thing about writ­ers with a sense of place, and his won­der­ing what made Burke’s nov­els Literature.

1C7A9CAA-B721-4D71-BE10-8C4D4D6CEC47.jpgThe com­ment popped up from my mem­ory yes­ter­day while I was read­ing Rain Gods and stopped at this descrip­tion. Some­thing about it both­ered me.

The book had been mov­ing along on the tide of its plot, emerg­ing from of vio­lence and con­fu­sion into a bar­ren Texas land­scape that became a tableau for a moral­ity tale of con­flict, iden­tity, spirit and love. The writ­ing is inten­tional: in each char­ac­ter, Burke’s work­ing a recov­ery, using words to cre­ate recog­ni­tion and con­nec­tion in a sus­tain­able way. And all the while, the plot is gath­er­ing inten­sity. The drama is elevated.

This one para­graph, when I read it, made me feel like he’d tried too hard. It was the Irish mouth that stopped me. What’s that mean? What does an Irish mouth look like? Thin and wan? Sup­ple and pink? An emblem got slapped on a char­ac­ter in the moment of intro­duc­tion that cre­ated an obsta­cle to really see­ing him. Then, his soul exud­ing sick­ness from his pores. We’ve got an Irish mouth and sick pores, and the result is that the per­son who is sit­ting at that desk is out­side of our imag­i­na­tion. We weren’t given the tools we can build an image with, so he stays empty, general.

But I’m work­ing my way through the book with inter­est, because that was one of the few places where Burke truly mis-stepped. The drama has become exis­ten­tial, a rumi­na­tion on the nature of good and evil, the radius of Love, pro­pelled by a plot that demands res­o­lu­tion, a kind of vio­lent need of the story itself.

When my dad asked the ques­tion, with a peev­ish, dis­ap­prov­ing tone, I gave a half-hearted defense that lacked con­vic­tion and shied away from the dis­dain that would fol­low my father’s sense that he’d been crossed.

What’s wrong with Burke? Noth­ing. This is a good writer who is cap­tur­ing a sense of place and con­nect­ing it to the ques­tion of man, of iden­tity, mem­ory and truth­ful­ness, of lives that are about sur­vival, not civ­i­liza­tion, of per­sonal loss and redemp­tion, pain, remove and obligation.

If art is the attempt to cap­ture expe­ri­ence, to shift our under­stand­ing and per­cep­tion of the world, then this qual­i­fies as art. It it meant to be pop­u­lar? Yes, the form and the ver­nac­u­lar are pop­u­lar, part of a fic­tion that has cer­tain for­mal require­ments. But form is the embrace of con­text. It cre­ates objec­tiv­ity in mod­ernism. Within the form, the effort to find some com­ment of human, on expe­ri­ence that shifts and turns: that qual­i­fies as art, and I would think in that essence is truly Literature.