Book Review: Wolf Whistle

A book reviewer for The Nation called Lewis Nordan’s award-winning 1993 novel Wolf Whistle “an immense and wall-shattering display of talent.” I think he went too far. Is Nordan being praised for breaking alleged “white silence” on the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett “Bobo” Till, or for talking honestly about race relations in Mississippi before the Civil Rights era? Did he punch through some barrier that keeps writing teachers from having their work embraced by book clubs around the country? The reviewer could have meant any or all of the above.

Nordan has an ear for dialog, an appreciation for scene, and a gift for shedding light on absurdities. He writes well about men who while away the hours on a storefront porch playing blues tunes by Robert Johnson. Up in New Jersey at that time, some of the white kids were starting to sing doo-wop on street corners, but – for anyone at risk of missing the glaringly obvious point -- life was harder below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Wolf Whistle held my attention. My problem with the novel is that although I believe the author when he says that he was deeply affected by the murder, which happened when Nordan was a teenager living just down the road, the story he wrung from that experience some 38 years later has more craft than heart.

If I’m right in that judgment, it’s because of two decisions that Nordan made before he started drafting the story. First, he wrote from a deep well of guilt, and it shows. The only decent people in the novel are the relatives with whom Bobo is staying when we meet him. “Auntee” and “Uncle” make a positive impression, but the world-weary goodness of their cameo appearance is not enough to lift the pall from the parade of horribles with which Nordan populates the rest of the narrative. George V. Higgins put fewer caricatures into The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and that novel was, as Vizzini might say, “entirely peopled with criminals.”

A first-year teacher named Alice could have been a counterweight to the bigots in Wolf Whistle, but Nordan makes her tragicomic by emphasizing her lack of boundaries. Alice, you see, is not yet over a recent affair with one of her married professors. We’re told that she has what the people of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi consider “new ideas.” But the only idea that Nordan actually gives Alice involves self-expression, and for her, that means taking fourth-grade students on traumatic field trips. The little darlings are frog-marched into sewage treatment plants, funeral parlors, and the home of one of their classmates, a dying boy who accidentally burned himself in a gasoline fire while trying to kill his shiftless father. When Alice eventually reserves balcony seats for her children at the trial of the men who murder Bobo, we are not surprised.

Critics praised Nordan for his honesty, but that honesty often looks like contempt, because other characters in the novel fare little better than Alice does. We know at the start of the book that an appreciative whistle from a black teenager to a white woman in Eisenhower’s America will not end well: Bobo’s reflexive response to a double-dog dare cannot bridge the racial and economic gulf between himself and the leggy blonde (not Alice) at whom he whistles. One wishes for his sake that the two of them had never met, and that she had driven her white Cadillac elsewhere rather than stop in a rainstorm to buy a tampon while Bobo and his friends were hanging around the store. Obviously that bell cannot be un-rung. But Nordan makes Mississippi sound even more hellish than the rest of us had thought it might be. His retroactive and undying shame suckles burdensome reading. It says something when even the suicidal John Kennedy Toole had more affection for the people of his native New Orleans than Lewis Nordan appears to have for other residents of Mississippi.

I said at the start that there were two things Nordan had done to unwittingly sabotage some of the force in his story. Deciding to write from guilt was one thing, and the other was choosing to rely on the literary approach known as “magical realism.” Columbian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez pioneered that tone with Love in the Time of Cholera, and while magical realism works better in Wolf Whistle than it did there, Nordan’s forays into vulture, parrot, and monkey minds feel more like tricks than narrative imperatives. The technique becomes a crutch. Remember the reviewer who was slack-jawed at “wall-shattering” literary talent? Calling the pet monkey in a black barbershop “Jefferson Davis” is a nice touch, but when Nordan writes from a vulture’s point of view, he’s building a wall between reader and writer, not shattering it. The wall comes with graffiti that says “I teach creative writing and you don’t.”

Pat Conroy, the dean of dysfunctional drama in Dixieland, could show Nordan what it means to practice self-restraint. When Conroy had a tiger deliver jungle justice to convicts who terrorized people in The Prince of Tides, he wisely did not write that scene from the tiger’s point of view.

In summary, Wolf Whistle is an impressive and psychologically rich novel about a tragic, important subject, but it is not the monument to unvarnished truth or progressive compassion that it so transparently aspires to be. The book falls short of masterpiece theater because it is cathartic without being redemptive. Arrow Catcher, Mississippi will never be confused with Winesburg, Ohio.