Word: sironia
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Dates: during 1952-1952
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...Middle Ranks. One way or another, it was a great year for Texas. After an ill-tempered clouting of its manners & morals by Edna Ferber in her bestselling Giant, the state produced three of the most widely talked-about books of the year: Madison Cooper's Sironia, Texas, a 1,731-page Texas-town saga which seemed to prove that Ferber's view had been right in the first place; Tom Lea's The Wonderful Country, singing Lea's love of his Rio Grande country, north & south of the border; and The Devil Rides Outside...
...have a freak memory," Cooper says. "I can remember indefinitely anything that is not important." In his opus, Cooper recalls almost everything unimportant that happened in Sironia, a pseudonymous Texas town (Cooper has always lived in Waco) in the first 20 years of the century. He tells the important things too; but with the gift of the true gossip for pure indiscrimination he can tell about a rape in the same cozy tone he uses to describe a family evening at home -and, in Sironia, one seems to have been as common as the other...
...fact, to judge from Sironia, Texas in those days must have been a dang sight wilder than even now. In the lives of Cooper's 30-odd major characters, there occur a flood, several murders and suicides, and a castration party. One whorehouse burns down, one Negro is burned alive, one changeling is introduced into a childbed...
Girls are seduced and others are beaten; at times it seems as though the streets of Sironia must be paved with female teeth. Crowbars are swung in labor strife, horsewhips in political campaigns. Sex-crazed old women corner fresh-faced youths in locked bedrooms. Blackmail is a commonplace, miscegenation comes almost as natural as breathing, and the highest ambition of mankind, it would seem, is to own a real, live, spangly N'awlins "hoah...
...short, Sironia, Texas is just the same old small-town story, as it has been told in 50 sensationalized bestsellers-only this time it's in Texas, and so there's much, much more of it. Also, there may be still more to come. Says Author Cooper: "Well, I figure I've still got about three more novels...