Word: grubb
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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FOOLS' PARADE, by Davis Grubb. 306 pages. World...
...Davis Grubb tells his fool story just right. The reader is not bitten by the wooden false teeth till page 172, too late for him to pretend that he knew they were lurking all the time in the sinister West Virginia underbrush...
...late afternoon of savage bottomlands heat in the April of 1935. Johnny Jesus stood between his two companions, leaning back against a high baggage wagon on the warped bricks of the depot landing and facing the big, moonfaced gunman." Serious business; savage bottomlands heat and a big moonfaced gunman. Grubb adds a sentence of smoky poetry to make sure everyone takes his meaning: "Uncle Doc [the gunman] was one of those humped, huge men who, beneath a cloak of paunch, are cat-swift as dainty dancers and hard as sacked salt...
...novelist, Grubb has written about Appalachian violence before. The Night of the Hunter (1954), his first book, is a shadowy work about a murderous preacher who chases a couple of kids up and down the Ohio River. The Voices of Glory (1962), a moody, backward-looking novel, has its share of crazy thunderation. They offer some clue as to why the "muttering meanness" guff in this book turns out to be more than just a touch overwritten...
...think of. The tall stories that Faulkner wrote when his mood was bourbon-light are in the same family; The Reivers bears a resemblance to Fools' Parade. Dark violence and piebald absurdity share an uncertain border, and now and then some mythmaker on his day off, like Grubb, manages to write within this uncertainty. A fine book, written for the hell of it, which is a splendid reason...