What do You think about Lie Down In Darkness (1992)?
As Lie Down in Darkness opens we are near the end of the story chronologically: it's 1945, the younger Loftis daughter, Peyton, has committed suicide, and several of those close to her are awaiting the train that bears her casket south to Tidewater Virginia. From that point we travel back and forth in time to watch the disintegration of the Loftis family as told from several points of view: first Milton, the alcoholic father, then Helen, the inadequate and punishing mother, and finally Peyton, the carefree, spoiled, and ultimately probably mentally ill daughter.Every character is horribly damaged goods, in every conceivable way - the damage both self-inflicted and inflicted by others. Some people like these dark, perfervid, passionate, morbid, Southern gothic stories. I'm not one of these people. What rescues this from being a book I would really dislike is some lovely writing - maybe one-third of the book could be described this way. Styron does physical description really well, and if more of the novel had been like this I would have enjoyed it more:Halfway between the railroad station and Port Warwick proper - a distance altogether of two miles - the marshland, petering out in disconsolate, solitary clumps of cattails, yields gradually to higher ground. Here, bordering on the road, an unsightly growth of weeds takes over, brambles and briars of an uncertain dirty hue which, as if with terrible exertion, have struggled through the clay to flourish now in stunted gray profusion, bending and shaking in the wind. The area adjacent to this stretch of weeds is bleakly municipal in appearance: it can be seen from the road, and in fact the road eventually curves and runs through it. Here there are great mounds of garbage; a sweet, vegetable odor rises perpetually on the air and one can see - from the distance faintly iridescent - whole swarms of carnivorous flies blackening the garbage and maybe a couple of proprietary rats, propped erect like squirrels, and blinking sluggishly, with mild, infected eyes, at some horror-stricken Northern tourist.It's impossible to endorse a daughter calling her father "Bunny" - but passages like this help ease the reader's discomfort:There were wide barren fields now, a patch of river to the south, the Rappahannock; this was territory that they knew, where one lane, one house or barn, gliding soundlessly past the car's vaultlike silence, only announced another house or lane or barn a few yards farther on, each more familiar as they drew closer to home. This was the Northern Neck, a land of prim pastoral fences, virgin timber, grazing sheep and Anglo-Saxons: these, the last, spoke in slumbrous Elizabethan accents, rose at dawn, went to bed at dusk, and maintained, with Calvinist passion, their traditional intolerance of evil. Most were Presbyterians and Baptists, many were Episcopalians, and all prayed and hunted quail with equal fervor and died healthily of heart failure at an advanced age; destiny had given them a peaceful and unvanquished lang to live in, free of railroads and big-city ways and the meretricious lures of the flesh, and when they died they died, for the most part, in contentment, shriven of their moderate, parochial sins. They were bounded by two rivers and the sky, and were as chary of the hinterland as of the deepest heart of Africa. A sturdy and honest curiosity filled their minds, provided the objects of such were not exotic or from the North, and the smell of sea filled their days; exacting in all matters, moral but never harsh, they lived in harmony with nature and called themselves the last Americans.
—Lobstergirl
...yet so archetypical is this South with is cancerous religiosity, its exhausting need to put manners before morals, to negate all ethos-- Call it a husk of a culture.The above quote summarises what I feel towards the South, and also why I, when I do not unwittingly borrow a book without knowing what it is about, try to avoid novels set in the South as much as possible. I was mistaken: it is not racism against African Americans that I prefer not to read about, excusing myself by saying "Once you've read one, you've read it all," knowing perfectly well that the same could be said about any other topic, trivially. No, I have pinpointed it down in the course of reading this novel: it is the South, with all its tight appearances its fakery its religion and all that sin and guilt and sin and guilt and the heat, the sun, there is always the sun, unrelenting, yellowed leaves and insistent bees, the worn-down tracks and stagnant puddles-- I don't like reading about the South. And: the neuroticism! The obsessiveness! Whirling and whirling, oh I have been done wrong to, how I hate her, my daughter, a whore and a tramp, how I have saved my weak husband, how I hate all these men. This book fleshes finely how infectious this tight hold on madness is, spreading across the family, outside of the family to anyone who gives a damn about any of them. The helplessness of it, because our only tool is reason, and madness pays no heed to reason. Wings and drowning and time. Madness plays everything over and over, amplifies it until all you can focus on is one look, one act, whinging about it again and again until I can't stand it, I keep reading and reading and spiral down the same corkscrew as the characters until I am half mad myself. Three stars, despite the beautiful prose, the bubbling prose that goes on stream-of-consciously? Yes, purely because I can't take this neuroticism. I cannot fault it for its technique, nor its characterisation, nor its plot. This is fully me: I just can't take this bomb of a story with its run-on lines its endless time-stopped moments its drunken stupor-- tell me you can after reading 400 pages of descriptive prose, including 50 pages of ONE paragraph. You got me right. ONE PARAGRAPH. -foams and dies-I also forgot to mention how disturbing Milton's lust for his daughter is. I was very sure I was going to find that he raped her somewhere in there.
—Zhi Xin Lee
William Styron was awarded the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for this his first novel, written when he was twenty-six - and compared to Updike's Rabbit Run (written when he was much the same age)it appears a much better work. But, it wasn't a novel I enjoyed. The echoes of Scott Fitzgerald - William Burroughs called it GETS (good enough to steal) - diminished the book for me. Example: About half-way between West and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills ..... THE GREAT GATSBY. Halfway between the railroad station and Port Warwick proper - a distance altogether of two miles - the marshland, petering out in disconsolate, solitary clumps of cattails, yields gradually to higher ground. Here, bordering the road, an unsightly growth of weeds .....LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS.
—Leonard Makin
