VOLUME 1 - 2006-2007
HARRY CREWS' AN AMERICAN FAMILY:
THE BABY WITH THE CURIOUS MARKINGS
Graham Press, 2006, 103 pages, ISBN: 0940941015
Harry Crews' An American Family: The Baby With the Curious Markings, a slim book and the self-described Southern "grit" writer's first novel since 1998's twisted trailer-park drama Celebration, arrived three decades after A Feast of Snakes, arguably the most accomplished work by the Georgia native, a longtime resident of Gainesville, Fla. What hath Crews wrought? By conventional standards of literary craftsmanship, and in comparison with the other novels by the retired University of Florida creative writing teacher, An American Family is a decidedly inferior work of fiction. The characters are largely underdeveloped, and the author's narrative is decidedly uncontrolled. The bloodletting in An American Family, unlike that in Crews' other work, is mostly disconnected from anything resembling dramatic tension.
The storyline, set somewhere in the Fort Lauderdale area, might be described as pure revenge fantasy. Major Melton, a junior college teacher and former Marine married to Nicky, a beautiful, wealthy, considerably younger woman, is attacked by a motley gang of his own family and would-be friends. Because of one or more instances of physical abuse that Major directed at Nicky, and due to other unnamed offenses committed by Major, she enlists her lover Pete Zack, her dentist parents, Pete's father and a hired-hand Japanese man with the unlikely name of Bac Bong Suc, to torture her husband.
As in many of Crews' novels, particularly 1992's Scar Lover, several characters are blemished or given deformities, beginning with the infant boy of the subtitle: An unusual birthmark, a bright purple figure shaped like a camel, mars the child's penis. An adult male sexual organ, belonging to the corpse of Pete's suicidal, seven-foot-tall father, Mr. Zack, is subject to the same fate visited on the sheriff's deputy in A Feast of Snakes - it's lopped off with a sharp blade. Major and Nicky live in a development called Crippled Horse Acres. (Those looking for autobiographical references might find some in the description of Mr. Zack: He's a novelist whose "Southern Gothic" work was well-reviewed "but didn't sell for spit" [80] ).
An American Family offers other parallels with A Feast of Snakes (and autobiographical references). Like the latter novel's Duffy Deeter, a Gainesville lawyer visiting the Rattlesnake Roundup in Mystic, Ga., Major is a wiry, hard-bodied professional accompanied by a younger woman. Both plots, too, feature an abundance of vicious pit bulls. Mr. Zack, like Big Joe in A Feast of Snakes, is a breeder of the animals, described as "devil dogs" (40) by one ill-fated young woman. Hundreds of the dogs, gathered together at The Pit Stop, Mr. Zack's pet store, figure into a mob scene that's nearly as hellish as the one described in A Feast of Snakes. The aforementioned girl, one of the survivors of the melee, suffers a fate possibly worse than that experienced by those who were killed by the rampaging dogs: "The girl had no face, only a reddish paste of blood and dirt from the hairline to chin" (47).
An American Family offers a redneck symphony of violent incidents, and practically nonstop bloodletting, including images of a salad fork driven through a hand, a successful suicide by hanging, pit bulls ripping into human flesh and crippled animals being fed, alive, into a meat grinder. The word "blood" appears on 11 of the book's 103 pages, by one count. Images of knives and blades proliferate: The child is to be named Mack, as in the Bobby Darin hit song "Mack the Knife." Major explains, "I want to raise him to be razor sharp and always ready to cut through the bullshit of this world" (102). Nicky's smile is described as "thin as the cut of a knife" (22) and the Japanese man's hands are "knife-thin" (70).
It would be practically impossible to construe An American Family as containing any calls to a moral or spiritual reaction to the bloodletting, or, really, any types of humanizing messages; those looking for redemption will be sorely disappointed. Booklist critic Brendan Driscoll, in one of the few widely distributed reviews of the novel, called it a "testosterone-fueled trance of cryptic meaning and freakish violence." A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote that the novella is a "twisted tale of violence and passion."
What accounts for all the violence? One explanation might be a general psychosis, a break from reality, experienced by man and beast alike in the book. Major's pet bulldog is "berserk" (1) and "shithouse crazy" (11). His friends are "going quietly mad" (1) and "the world has gone crazy" (34). A cabbie drives "like a madman" (25), and Mr. Zack is "a very famous crazy person" (36). Emasculation is suggested as a reason for the madness - Major's problems result from being "tied on a leash that was too short" (1) - and then is practically dropped as a theme, although late in the novella Pete makes mention of "the rehabilitated savage" (93).
An American Family concludes with an entirely improbable reunion between the battered Major and Nicky, who has overseen her husband's torture. The story's resolution appears to be little more than a quick, frivolous exit from the bloody goings-on, rather than a meaningful response to all that's preceded it; the violence has little apparent meaning. Nicky's nonsensical summing-up of all that she's seen, including a view through a picture window of her son resting peacefully on the stomach of Mac, the dog, essentially recycles words uttered 61 pages earlier by Mr. Zack: "What a beautiful, terrible world," she says. For fans of a major, underappreciated Southern stylist, once gifted with absolute control over his craft, that's the unkindest and most painful cut of all.
- Philip Booth