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 The story alternates chapters between the present and events ten years earlier when the murder took place as Arlene embarks on a journey of discovery about herself, her family and her past. It is a journey filled with twists and surprises, and one that will keep the reader turning pages with anticipation even though at first glance it seems to feature a cast of fairly familiar characters.
Reviewed by Jack Goodstein
Gods in Alabama
by Joshilyn Jackson
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Warner Books (April 13, 2005)
ISBN: 0446524190
The obvious way to begin a review of Joshilyn Jackson’s first novel, "gods in Alabama" (she uses the lower case ‘g’ in the title) is with some clever reference to Thomas Wolfe. Jackson, unfortunately one step ahead of the clever reviewer, steals that thunder by appropriating the allusion herself in the course of the novel. Besides, while it may be true that you can’t go home again to North Carolina, sweet home Alabama may be another matter entirely.
Jackson’s story is told by Arlene Fleet, a graduate assistant in English at a Chicago University, who has escaped from rural Posset, Alabama and her down home white family vowing, among other things, never to return. In Chicago, she has found herself an upwardly mobile boyfriend, a tax attorney, an American Baptist; he is kind and sensitive, and he also happens to be black. She has come North rejecting all the values of her past, the gods of Alabama: "Jack Daniel’s, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus," and a black boyfriend would seem to be the pinnacle of that rejection. Her apparent hatred for small town Alabama is not simply a rebellion against small minded relatives and red neck values. There is something more, something much more devastating. There is rape, and there is murder.
Arlene leaves after high school with three promises to God. Promiscuous in high school–she claims to have had sex with every boy in the sophomore class–she will become celibate. She will never tell a lie, although she may not always tell all she knows, and she will never, never under any conditions return to Alabama.
As the novel begins she is now twenty five and has kept the letter of these promises, and most of the spirit, when circumstances begin to change and her past begins to catch up with her. Her Aunt Florence, the woman who raised her and still takes care of her emotionally disturbed mother, wants her to come home for her uncle’s retirement party. Her boyfriend is talking about marriage and wants to meet her family. But most important of all, a young woman from her past shows up in Chicago asking questions about a boy, Jim Beverly, who had disappeared during high school and whom Arlene claims to have murdered. When the woman threatens to go back to Alabama to find Beverly, Arlene decides it is time to begin breaking her promises.
The story alternates chapters between the present and events ten years earlier when the murder took place as Arlene embarks on a journey of discovery about herself, her family and her past. It is a journey filled with twists and surprises, and one that will keep the reader turning pages with anticipation even though at first glance it seems to feature a cast of fairly familiar characters. Arlene, herself, is the bright misfit rebelling against what she secretly wants. Her cousin Clarice, on the other hand, is one of the most popular girls in the school–pretty and good natured as well. Then there are Arlene’s drug sotted mother, her forceful strong willed Southern Baptist aunt and her easy going, good old boy uncle. In the end Arlene and the reader discover that there may be more to these people than meets the eye at first acquaintance, indeed even after knowing them for twenty five years. Like Jim Beverly, seemingly merely the big man at the high school–football player and home town hero used to getting everything he wants, but perhaps a bit more complex than the stereotype. On the one hand he is capable of helping a young girl avoid the embarrassment of the accident of her first period, while on the other hand he can drunkenly demand oral sex from another. He can be a sweet boy who treats his girlfriend who has been physically abused by her father with tender loving care. He can be a brutal rapist. In a sense Arlene has stereotyped the characters in her story, only to discover that these stereotypes, like all stereotypes, are inadequate. People simply do not always fit so easily into the little cubby holes in which we try to stuff them. Even her family’s reaction to her black fiancé is not quite what she or the reader would have expected.
These are people who live in a world where violence lies just beneath the surface ready to rear its ugly head at any moment. They are people who defend their own and believe firmly in an eye for an eye. One is reminded of some of the classics of Southern Gothic fiction: Faulkner’s Miss Emily sleeping for years beside the corpse of the Yankee that jilted her; Flannery O’Conner’s nine year old Mary Fortune Pritts beating her grandfather who has sold off the front lawn of their house. One is reminded of the incestuous sexual attack and the family response in Dorothy Allison’s "Bastard Out of North Carolina." Like these, Jackson’s Alabama is a world where family is sacred and vengeance doesn’t necessarily wait on the Lord, and certainly not on the local authorities. You protect your own, and if one of your own gets hurt, you do something about it.
Arlene’s Aunt Florence is the exemplar. When her sister’s husband dies and her sister goes into a depressive funk, she comes to help. She takes in her sister and her niece , cares for them, brings the young girl up as her own. It is she who is always begging the prodigal Arlene to come home for a visit, for Christmas, at semester break. When her own son dies as a child, she is inconsolable, event to the point of killing the dog that was inadvertently responsible for the boy’s death. A neighbor who ignorantly equates her motherly grief with the grief she would feel at the death of her pet chicken, discovers that her chicken is missing and then receives a chicken pie as a condolence gift, perhaps not quite in the same league as the feast fed to Thyestes, but certainly and indication of the power of her wrath. This is a woman who will forgive her own nearly anything, but forgive others nothing.
That we see her through the eyes of a fifteen year old obsessed with herself as is typical of teenagers and later those of an estranged adult who sees her merely as a nuisance to be avoided at all costs puts the reader in the position of only slowly coming to realize, as Arlene comes to realize the truth about the woman’s character. In some sense this is true about everything in the novel. Arlene is a narrator who thinks she know the truth, but who in fact knows a good deal less than she thinks, not only about the people she describes, but about what took place as well.
Her discoveries about her family and her past make for a compelling novel shaped with both wit and intelligence. gods in Alabama is a first novel that augers well for those to come.
About the Reviewer: Jack Goodstein is a professor emeritus at California University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught English for more than thirty years. His work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Critique, Theatre Journal and College English and in literary magazines such as The Maine Review, The Small Pond Magazine of Literature and The Jewish Digest. In 1990 at age 51, he tried his hand at acting, and while he has always loved the theatre from the audience, discovered an unexpected addiction to the stage as a performer. Since then he has appeared in more than sixty plays throughout Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania. He has also done film and commercial work. This ultimately led to his attempts at writing for the stage. His one act, Pinochle was given a staged reading at the ATHE conference in Toronto in July of 1999 and was published by the University of Charleston Press. In April 2000, his one act, Poker, was produced by the Pulse Ensemble Theatre in Manhattan as part of their OPAL series. Bride of the Father(2000) and Creative Daydreaming (2001) were produced by the Gallery Players of Park Slope in Brooklyn. Other one acts have had readings or been staged at Far Off Broadway and Northern LightsTheatre in Canada, and New York University and the Cafe Sha Sha in New York. Another of his pieces is on line at <A HREF="http://www.dhj5.homestead.com/Issue5pg19.html" "target="_blank">http://www.dhj5.homestead.com/Issue5pg19.html
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