Word: berendt
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...book, this motley assemblage of characters and stories is held together by Berendt's wry, dispassionate first-person narrator who puts just the right amount of distance between himself and the events he is witnessing...
...Williams is only one of many, many characters Berendt has on file. There's also Luther Driggers, an eccentric chemist who carries on his person a vial of poison powerful enough to kill every man, woman and child in Savannah; Joe Odom, a ne'er-do-well lawyer who lives in other people's houses and steals electricity from next door when the power company cuts him off; and, of course, the irrepressible Lady Chablis...
...that course of action. Instead, they give us John Kelso (Cusack), an idealistic young writer from New York who comes to Savannah to write an essay on a Christmas party and ends up getting involved in Williams' murder trial. By embroiling Kelso in the plot, the refreshing detachment of Berendt's narrative is lost. The story shifts from the town and people of Savannah to the fictional Kelso--his life, his ideals and, I'm sorry to say, his loves...
...credit, there is no old-fashioned, romantic heterosexual love in the original Midnight. Its most interesting and lovable characters are con men, hustlers, drag queens and witches. Berendt's narrator revels unrepentantly in Savannah's decadence and its culture of closeted scandal. He falls in love with the city's roguishness, its peculiar brand of dark but endearing degeneracy cloaked in gentility. In short, he is nothing like Cusack's dippy, sententious young idealist. The closest he comes to romance is a date with a drag queen. And he certainly bears no resemblance to the late Elvis Presley, whom Cusack...
...Calvin Klein's skanky ad campaigns and the Broadway musical Rent, the same cast of dog-eared guys and Avenue B girls are everywhere. And drag? Never heard of it. Only kidding. RuPaul. Wong Foo. Switch on Good Morning America and there's Lady Chablis, the transvestite from John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. In a cooking segment, no less...