Finished 8/20/08Part of me hates this book. Hates the characters, their slithery morality and unfulfilled aspirations, hates how the emptiness, the vacuum left is filled the coiled hissing forms of snakes and how it gets under the skin and into the stomach and bowels. I acknowledge the power and intensity Harry Crews has at his command, but I do not admire his A Feast of Snakes.Each year in Mystic, Georgia, Jon Lon organizes the Rattlesnake Roundup, a festival that attracts a denizen of unsavory gypsies, thrill-seekers, and drunkards. They arrive in campers and Winnebagos, setup wares, fight dogs, partake in a beauty pageant, and set fire to a thirty-foot-tall snake. So yes, it’s a hillbilly version of the wicker man.‘Hillbilly’ is an appropriate term, since the Jon Lon’s plight plays out as hillbilly angst. That’s because Jon Lon cannot find love. Not in his wife, his inamorata, his children, his friends, his family, his job, or his position as organizer of the Roundup. No, Jon Lon only laments for the past and his former glories of high school football star and his old girlfriend. One wonders how Jon Lon expects to find “true love” if his definition involves atm, which Crews graphically describes in one of many vile, foul, and cruel sex scenes. So Jon Lon is stuck operating the liquor store once owned by his father and spends most of the day drinking and bitching at his wife. His father isn’t much different except that he bitches at his daughter since his wife killed herself years ago.The whole book is foul and cruel. Foul because Crews revels in shock. Cruel because Crews casts a hateful eye on all his citizens and puts them through the wringer. Even Lottie Mae, the sole redeeming subplot in the entire novel, is brutalized, driven insane, and disturbed by snakes before she is able to exact an even crueler revenge.Lottie Mae, a young black girl, is the object of the sheriff’s desire. The sheriff Buddy is a mangled man, a landlocked hillbilly pirate, I guess, with his peg leg. His real leg he lost in ‘Nam. Buddy, too, laments the past for he, too, was once a football star. Most of the male characters were. Now he occupies his time by carrying snakes, one in a sack and the other in his pants. Yes, that is a metaphor Crews pounds in your head, over and over. The phallic nature of snakes. The sexual connotation of Eve’s temptation, of the snake in the garden. And on and on.I’m exaggerating somewhat, since the snake metaphor is one of the few things Crews deftly handles, despite the overkill. His similes and his prose, however, are dull, especially in the first half. Let me quote a little gem here describing Jon Lon’s wife: “Two inches below her navel her belly just leaped out in this absolutely unbelievable way.” Well, that’s absolutely unbelievable! But it gets better: “she looked like she was carrying a basketball under her dress.” A basketball, no kidding!The dialogue, mostly in dialect, is authentic, though I questioned some of the intentional misspellings. And the prose does get better in the second half, lyrical at times, but he still stumbles over similes. With obvious imaginative powers, why does Crews stumble with similes?Rereading what I wrote, I’m shocked I haven’t mentioned the violence. The book’s back cover notes that Crews covers the vices of “adultery, castration, suicide, and murder.” This list, of course, leaves out bullying, rape, drunkenness, drunken driving, fights, lies, animal brutality including mutilation and dog fighting, racism, sexism, abandonment, kidnapping, battered wives, neglected wives, paraphilia, madness, delusions, feces fascination, religion bashing, and idleness. All of which are ingredients for an instant cult classic!But yes, there is a lot of violence, a lot of touting of masculinity and then more violence. One could posit that Crews argues against masculinity and its corrupting power, which is true. But Crews idealizes athleticism in a well-rendered scene of weight-lifting and dick-measuring, which in the south is how one determines the pecking order. The equivalent of dogs sniffing the other’s rectum.Despite the Southern Gothic nature, it’s rather insulting for readers cite Crews alongside the masters Faulkner and O’Connor. Both incorporated humanity in their works, dealt with underlying problems in the south, and both, in the end, were redemptive, even if at times it was a freak show. Crews, however, is just a freak show. With the exception of Lottie Mae, who’s in so little of the book and so distant from the main thread, A Feast of Snakes has little value, which disappoints me since Crews does have intensity as a writer.
In one of his essays collected in Blood and Grits Harry Crews explains that there came a time when he was trying to write fiction that he realized, if he was going to be any good at his craft, that he had to stop pretending to be someone he wasn't and start writing about what he knew. Embrace his roots. There was plenty that Crews wished he had never experienced, but he didn't get to pick whether or not he grew up poor in Bacon County, Georgia. Because he decided to be true to his heritage, we readers get the opportunity to get a glimpse into a slice of his hell. Bare-knuckled, uneducated, violent and alcoholic hell. Going nowhere fast.Joe Lon Mackey, the former All-American running back from Mystic, Georgia could be considered the protagonist of the story, but that would be a lie. The real protagonist of this book is Mystic itself - a backwater small town far enough away from Atlanta it may as well be Atlantis. Mystic hosts an annual Rattlesnake Roundup where people come from around the continent to fetch themselves some diamondbacks. This event plays as the backdrop to a host of local yokels, each potentially more fucked up than the next, with Joe Lon as the somewhat central star that calls their orbit. We watch Mackey's deterioration as the narrative unfolds; his withering alcoholism mirrors everyone else that has failed to escape Mystic. The town has a gravitational pull comprised of booze, easy sex and the halcyon recollection of youthful days. It circles its denizens with a pit of snakes, literally and figuratively, and the only hope one has of achieving an escape velocity is education. Crews writes in the third person omniscient about Joe Lon: He wished to God he could escape. But he didn't know where he could go or what he wanted to escape from. Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son. But if you must, there's a place for you here in Mystic.I'm not going to pretend that this was easy to read. There is adultery, rape, murder, domestic violence, specific violence, general violence, dog fighting (along with a very, very specific and violent training regimen that makes it clear that Crews was exposed to this horrific event), mayhem. There are no likable characters (out of about a dozen). I was so shocked by the ending of this book I spent the afternoon talking about it with my wife and a friend. But this is how good Crews is, and why - as a reader that seeks the real - I am so happy that he chose years ago to embrace his past. I may be a son of the south, but I never knew Crews' people: Grits. And if he didn't write about the shitty, awful existence of poor, alcoholic, uneducated, racist, violent and seemingly execrable humans - people that didn't choose to be born in that place and time, how would he ever be able to show that it was possible to rise above that scum to do better? Crews is the Doppelgänger of Joe Lon. He proves that you can get out, that life is better. And it doesn't have to end the way that this book did.
What do You think about A Feast Of Snakes (1998)?
Well...from the first line of this book (off the top of my head "she squirmed with pleasure as the snake twisted between her breasts" or something like that) you know what kind of world you are in. Redneck world! And the strange thing here is that the author doesn't really try to say "you know, all the bad things people say about rednecks is wrong, they are normal people like you and me." Because, in this book, no one is normal at all. I got a bit of sympathy for the protagonist by the end, but it's hard to have sympathy for a guy who realizing that his life sucks, says, "let's kill as many people as I can, and definitely by successful ex-girlfriend."So it didn't really work with me. I know it is genre fiction, and I honestly like genre fiction, but something was lacking. Although the narrative is pretty good. The story moves along quickly and I did always want to discover what happens next, even if it was undoubtably going to be more alcohol, sex and violence. And I don't really get the snakes things either. If you like celebrating America's underbelly--and this is my theory for why it has such a cult following, including Kim Gordon and Lydia Lunch naming a band after Crews--this is a book for you. It brings out that underbelly better than almost anything, and 30 years ago as well. But it still didn't say much about this underbelly to me, and that's what I think we want in novels.
—Nicholas During
Sometimes how you come to read a book is intriguing. Perhaps you browse the shelf after shelf, book jacket after book jacket at a book shop. Maybe you read vast literary reviews or reviews by your contemporaries who have similar book tastes. On rare occasions, I find a book just happens to fall into my possession out of thin air I cannot for the life of me recall how I came to own it. But the very best way to acquire a book, I believe, is when an acquaintance who truly knows your literary taste says to you, "You must read this." This is how I came to read "A Feast of Snakes." My boyfriend, John who knows my literary palate and bookshelves (sometimes better than me) recommended this book. We were on a shopping spree in one of thee best second-hand book stores in all of Florida when he handed me this book. He explained that Harry Crews was a well known Floridian author and then sealed the deal by saying, "You will enjoy this."John was right. Crews immerses the reader into the deep south of Mystic, Georgia where the local dialect is much different than what I am accustomed to. If I can muster a complaint about this book it is that I had to take my time wrapping my Yankee brain and tongue around sentences like, "Hit tetched me all the living while." But that is just a small hurdle for this Yankee reader because what pulled me in nose first into this book was the raw rough edges of the characters' lives. Okay, I'll be honest there was one other part of the book where I shook my little Yankee head. Okay, I'll tell you and you can judge me viciously! Two adult females had a baton twirling contest outside and I had a hard time imagining baton twirling in my backyard. The main character, Joe Lon Mackey was the epitome of an alpha-male when he was in high school and during the first few opening pages you feel how far down he has fallen. You are pulled with him into the gravitational disgust of his dismal life: an unhappy marriage, unwanted children, a drunken father who abuses dogs, a psychologically disturbed sister and his lethargic job running the local tavern. A man who once felt on top of the world has fallen into the gloom of reality in Mystic. I don't want to mislead you, this is not a book which revolves around one person. There is a small cast of characters which Crews does a great job weaving into dark places as well, some characters into darker places than Joe Lon even experiences.Crews pivots each character around Mystic's annual snake festival. Imagine a small town filled with an influx of people, snakes and drunken festivities. A town already filled with darkness and then amplifying it to its greatest extent. This composite of tourists and the snake festival itself are more than enough to make the book severe but it is the local residents which draw Crews to write with a undeniable rough edge comparable to that of Cormac McCarthy.The darkness in Mystic becomes a common thing and the characters think nothing of the gloom in their lives or in the lives of others. It is a gloom they accept and attempt to forget. In one sentence, a man (Lummy) over hears Joe Lon screaming at his father over the telephone. Crews writes elegantly "But Lummy might as well have been hearing a woodpecker in a tree or rain on a tin roof. It was the natural sound of the world, too much like everything else, and he wouldn't remember it."I may not have the rural southern dialect mastered, but I clearly understood the battle against darkness, gloom and utter despair which unraveled in this book. More than that, I love reading a book that is dark and elegant all at once. But most importantly it was recommended to me by someone who knew I would enjoy the darkness, the elegant sentences and then contemplate the sociological composition of the book. Not only does a reader enjoy a book, they cherish how they acquired the book.
—Kata
Not bad, I guess for a "hillbilly noir," po' white trash turning berserk and homicidal in the Deep South. But somehow I expected more. I mean, the premise is fantastic . . . Every year in the little town of Mystic, Georgia (high school football team "the Rattlers"), there is a "Rattler Day," which features the crowning of a high school girl as "Miss Rattler," followed by her ritual torching of a huge snake effigy, followed in turn by a pit bull battle. Then, the next day, the real fun: hundreds of snakes are released into the woods and the snake hunt begins . . . Many of the incidents are shocking, vicious and memorable, but--in spite of its spare style and mere 175 pages--it meanders (like a snake?) until it reaches its violent, inadequately motivated end. I should have re-read a Jim Thompson novel instead.
—Bill Kerwin