Carolyn, thanks for bringing the Haines books to my attention. I read the synopses of the four you mentioned above and they do sound interesting. I have to tell you, though, that I am very, very picky about reading anything set in the South. The main reason: None of them will ever live up to Gone with the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird. While that may not be fair, other things about "southern" novels -- particularly ones that are written nowadays -- really gripe me. For one, they are often so clichéd that I want to scream at the writer: Find a new leitmotif and don't lard on the southernisms! There are other interesting things about the South besides racism, incest, rednecks, Southern Belle wannabes, religious fundamentalists, and varied perversions. I suppose, though, that those are the things that many, if not most readers, expect to find in a story about the South. It irks me no end, I'm afraid. Ms Haines may handle such things better or differently, however. I will try one, at least, and go from there. Which one did you read first?

The mystery series sounds good. You know I find ghostly doings right up my alley.

Do you feel that way about James Lee Burke? His books are filled with violence, corruption, alcoholism, racism and the most beautiful descriptions of place and memory, love, family, and human insight. To call his books mysteries is to do them a great injustice. They are truly Southern novels filled with the depth of human experience.

I think Mockingbird is a great Southern novel but my second choice would be Look Homeward Angel. And then there's all of Carson McCullers, Black Boy, The Color Purple... I could go on. There does seem to be something about Southern writers. What I expect from Southern writers is a strong sense of place and a beauty of language that transcends the often ugly insights they deal with.

Granjan, I'll cut Burke a lot of slack for the kind of writing he does. He doesn't bother me half as bad as he does my husband. I told DH to quit reading Burke if he dislikes him so much, but he says it's fun to give Burke a cussing for getting things wrong -- strange impetus for reading, in my opinion, but to each his own. We were out in the boat a while ago -- hubby in the back, me up front -- both of us reading until suddenly something flew past my ear and plopped into the water. It was Burke's Crusader's Cross. I asked what had instigated the action and hubby said Burke doesn't know enough about seismograph crews. DH hustled jugs (geophones) from Morgan City, LA to Rexburg, Idaho so any inauthenticity in that line is going to annoy him. I wouldn't have noticed.

I thought I ought to like Thomas Wolfe so I went through a phase, but eventually I got over him. Carson McCullers is too overwrought for my taste. I like Faulkner for his "worst" book, The Reivers. Some Southern writers certainly do have "a strong sense of place" and "transcend" with language. Others -- and particularly the ones I call faux Southern -- just use the southern setting as an excuse to exhibit assorted freakish behaviors. The latter seem to outnumber the former, unfortunately, in my opinion...thus, my pickiness.

Frieda Question 1. Who was steering the boat or do you employ a crew of muscular lascars?!

Q 2. If you, or anyone had to recommend a book by a southern US author, or about southern life who/what would you suggest?
Nothing mawkish please.

I always remember an episode of The Golden Girls when someone says to Blanche (the Southern one) "The trouble with you Southerners is that you all marry your cousins and have too many names." Is this a dastardly lie?

I like all of Faulkner but did particularly enjoy The Reivers because it is so wonderfully funny.

The first Haines book I read outside the mystery series was Judas Burning when it was new last year. I hadn't realized she had written the others until just recently.

I agree that GWTW and TKAM are the very best, but I'm a sucker for moonlight and magnolias. I adore James Lee Burke's writing but was annoyed with him personally at a book reading when someone asked what he reads for pleasure and he replied that he "doesn't read modern novels" but was at that time re-reading Shakespeare. Give me a break--he wants us to buy his books, doesn't he?

Frieda, LOL.What you said about some southern writers! I could not agree more about the inevitable cliches many fall into. I think you possibly mean writers like Eugenia Price, A.R. Siddons and maybe P. Conroy? I can find lots wrong with Peggy Mitchell's GWTW, by the way. But at least she was ahead of her times.

Vee, have you read Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird? If so, what did you think?

Mary I have read To Kill a Mockingbird . . .many many years ago, and seen the film.
Off the top of my head the general 'tone' of the book reminds me of Peace Like a River where I said here at RP that I found the degree of violence very worrying and someone replied that is how things were out 'West' perhaps 40 or so years ago, where there is/was a history of taking the law into your own hands.
So is Mockingbird a 'good' example of a Southern novel set in the 30's? Were I to read a 'modern' work would I find that times had moved on and brotherly-love (or at least less hatred/bigotry) had become the order of the day?

Re your last query, Vee: it's a tough call, hard to say, human nature being what it is. I am having a hard time coming up with a modern or post-modern work set in the South that I would recommend. The author of "Secret Life of Bees" ,S.M. Kidd, tried to deal with some of the issues of the early Civil Rights movement and feminism in the deep south. However, I seem to be in a minority in having liked this work of fiction.

Many seem to like Eudora Welty, as a Southern writer, but I have never cared for her work, myself.

Vee, since most of the southern writing I love is pre-World War II, I'm like Mary and can't think of good recommendations. I did like Delta Wedding, but that's the only Welty that really impressed me.

Oh, have you read Catherine Marshall's Christy? It's set in the Smoky Mountains (Tennessee, I think, but don't hold me to it) in the early 1900s. The titular character is a young schoolteacher that, if I remember correctly, was based on Marshall's mother. Marshall, who was the wife of Peter Marshall, chaplin of the Senate, writes from a spiritual standpoint, but I don't think it's at all off-putting in the context of Christy's story. This was a very popular novel, especially amongst young women, in the late 1960s when I was in college. I reread it every few years, and while there are parts that have always made me cry, I don't think it's mawkish. There was a television series based on the book -- now that did strike me as mawkish, the few segments I saw.

Sigh. I seem to be among a very small group of readers of To Kill a Mockingbird not to see it as being principally about racism. Yes, racism is a very important part of the story, but you'd think that it and Atticus's defense of Tom Robinson are the be-all and end-all. The film, I'm afraid, has strengthened that impression -- that and the teaching of the novel in middle and high schools by shallow, not very discerning teachers. I see TKAM as a coming-of-age story plus a slice-of-southern-small-town life as it was in the 1930s. For instance, I am appalled that Jem's interaction with Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose is given short shrift when it is every bit as important in the forming of the man (and woman, in Scout) as the Tom Robinson trial and the incident when Jem's arm was broken. But racism is the hot button and sure to get the headlines. Too bad, also, that many non-southerners get a warped view of southerners in general when all they consider is this one aspect.

Carolyn, sheesh, Burke is a snob. That's disappointing. The books of his that I've read are very colorful. Jole Blon's Bounce was one. He does Acadiana well, I think, though somewhat exaggerated and with poetic license; but that's all right for storytelling. The fais dodo is fun.

Off the top of my head the general 'tone' of the book reminds me of Peace Like a River where I said here at RP that I found the degree of violence very worrying and someone replied that is how things were out 'West' perhaps 40 or so years ago, where there is/was a history of taking the law into your own hands.Vee, I have to comment about this! Whoever replied that the violence in Peace Like a River is "how things were out 'West' perhaps 40 or so years ago" has as warped an impression of Westerners as many people have of Southerners. First off, the events of Peace Like a River bear only the faintest resemblance to any actual events. The closest example I can think of is the Charlie Starkweather/Caril Ann Fugate killing spree in Nebraska and Wyoming in 1957 and that's only superficial. Secondly, the setting of Peace Like River is the northern plains of the U.S. in the early 1960s (for cripes sake!) where the principal population groups were about as hotheaded and coldblooded as lutefisk. Sure there were the occasional wackos, but the problem wasn't endemic then and still isn't as far as I know. The Wild West mentality is mostly myth, anyway.

Frieda and Mary, thank you for your suggestions.
No Catherine Marshall books seem available over here, but I have dug out a couple of my late Mother's books: T Stribling's works The Forge and The Store written in the 30's.
A Google site decribes him as part of the 'Southern Renaissance' of writers. Who were some/any of the others; does anyone know?

Frieda sorry I was being far too general in describing 'PLAR' as 'western' and using the word in the sense that it was just not 'eastern'!
So, if PLAR doesn't give a true impression of life in the area in which it is set (being careful here), does TKAMB give an accurate picture of 'life' of the people of Alabama during the 30's? It certainly feels right. When the book first came out was there an outcry from the locals "We were never like that" etc?
Sorry for all the questions; blame it on curiosity, though why it should 'kill the cat' . . .!

Heh! Vee, do read The Store and give us your opinion. I haven't read it in years and don't have a copy, so I'll just say that it was one of those books that makes some Southerners hoppin' mad (angry).

I agree that TKAM feels right, even to a non-southerner, because...well, just let me quote this:
Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then; a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.Ms Lee was talking about a town in Alabama, of course, but I think most Americans of a certain age could recognize aspects of their own towns and townfolk in that description. And then there's the universality of childhood experience: we were all children once, even lawyers (to paraphrase the Charles Lamb epigram).

I'll never forget the first time I heard about To Kill a Mockingbird; I was ten years old. A bunch of the family was sitting at Oma's kitchen table playing moon, or 42, and jawing. An uncle came in and smacked this black-covered book onto the table, making the dominoes jump. He did it on purpose because he wanted somebody to ask, "What book is that, Deet?" Of course somebody did and Dieter intoned, "You all need to read this book." We all eventually did read it, but being the youngest I had to wait what I thought was unconscionable long time -- some of the adults were darn-slow readers. And it just about drove me crazy because they were all talking about it.

That was either in the fall of 1960 or winter of 1961 and was in Iowa, a long way from the action of Ms Lee's novel. Some years later, a family member married an Alabamian from Coffeyville (just up the road from Monroeville), and I got her to tell me the story of her family's reaction. She said the first word of mouth was a lot of muttering and grumbling because folk were afraid it was going to be another Stars Fell on Alabama (an earlier controversial novel); but as people started reading it, they couldn't help but relate to even the unflattering aspects. A few older people, she said, refused to ever read it, but most of the younger folk did pretty quickly, out of curiosity. When it came out in the Reader's Digest, they knew they had a winner from their own backyard, and most readers eventually embraced it and were quite proud. However, they always thought the "outside world" was prone to misinterpreting a lot of the story. I suspect they were right -- and still are -- but that's the nature of writing a book and letting the world pass judgment.

Frieda, I've started with The Forge. Think ponderous GWTW . . . no romance but occasional burst of humour, and a use of thick dialect "Mas' Pedero, a n*ggah come from fudder up de road, tell us 'bout de Battle uv M'lasses . .. fought ovah yonder in de eas' a' de Lawd fought on de side uv de men f'um de South and de sojers f'um de Nawth throw down dey ahms an' run to Wash'n'ton." and so on . . . and on.
and yes, I am able to understand it, but it makes for slow going. Stribling did win a Pulitzer prize for it. ;-)

Vee-I recently read Beach Music by Pat Conroy.
I have never been in the "South" and never read anything before by Conroy, so don't know how accurate this was about "real life".
While the book starts out in Rome, most of the plot/storyline takes place in South Carolina with a lot of flashbacks to the '60's.
It is all about family & friends relationships over the years and I found it quite well done and interesting.

There is also that book that was very popular a few years back call "The Ya-Ya's" or something similar about very dysfunctional people in the south....why do these books always seem to be about dysfunctional southerners?....I have no idea!

Pat

Thanks Pat, I haven't read any Conroy so will look out for Beach Music.
I read the Ya Ya Sisterhood thing some years ago and also her follow-up book, but set 'before' the first one. Now that was really dysfunctional, with the impression given that some of the children (adults in the Ya Ya) had in some way been abused, maybe sexually(?) by a parent.
Perhaps it's something in the southern water; a lack of bromide maybe?

Vee, good Lord! You know that I love dialects; but if the whole of The Forge and The Store are written as you've cited, I would be slowed down to a crawl trying to figure out and "hear" the dialect and I wouldn't be able to hold onto the storyline, I'm afraid. George Eliot's Adam Bede did that to me as well, so it's not just American southern dialects.

I've read only one Pat Conroy book: The Great Santini. While I liked that one quite well, I thought it got a bit melodramatic and mushy in parts. I remember trying to read a couple of other Conroy books, but I think I recognized the same bit of manipulation and was put off.

The Ya-Ya things: I read them and thought yuck! They seem to have been written with a formula to reinforce the stereotypes of southern white women as neurotics and Southern Belle wannabes that non-southerners seem fascinated with. Why? My South Carolinian sister-in-law says that southern writers have created a disproportionate impression in the minds of non-southerners that all southerners are "messed up." She blames the writers and not the readers because, as she says, the readers are only ignorant; the writers know better but choose to exploit the stereotypes, anyway, for "easy sale."

All of this has moved from Carolyn's original comments about C. Haines and her books. Carolyn, can you give us a sense of how Haines handles the stereotypical? I'm guessing she must have a different angle or you wouldn't have been impressed. Is that right?

I don't know that impressed is the right word. It's more a dread of (and fascination with) what you know is coming. She tells a terrific story that you have to finish, and the ending is satisfying; but there is violence, spousal abuse, kids in dire straits, etc. She also pulls in the supernatural but more as a warning of things to come and not in a horrible haunting kind of way--more as if she really believes in ghosts or has come up with that as a literary device.

Her books are really different, and I just wondered if anyone else had read them and cared to comment.

I thought Pat Conroy's "Prince of Tides" was better than "Beach Music." Having said that, I don't think his writings are free of exaggerations and cliches about the South. I could not get past the first chapter of "Ya-Ya." Seemed too "chick lit" for my taste.

I think Frieda made a good point about Harper Lee's TKAM, in that it has universal appeal, in terms of her sense of place, in the American small town of that era and in terms of Scout's personality. I think that is part of what you meant, Frieda. Yet, something in it was distinctly southern, too, in the same sense that Twain's "Tom Sawyer" captures that flavor, IMO.

Mary, yes, you boiled down very nicely what I meant about the appeal of TKAM. I agree with Tom Sawyer, too, though I tend to think of Hannibal, Missouri as midwestern, as it's not so far from my Iowan neck of the woods. But I know that Missouri was a border state during the Civil War that certainly held many southern sympathies.

Carolyn, let me apologize for diverting this conversation from the books of Ms Haines to one of my old pet peeves: that of common misconceptions about southerners perpetuated by many writers, but most particularly by southern writers themselves. I love southerners and can get all worked up when I think they are stupidly stereotyped.

Oh, don't apologize ;-). I find these topics endlessly fascinating. I agree it seems a pity that Southerners get lampooned so often in novels, even those written by southerners themselves, hoisted upon their own petard....

I suspect that the reason people are so fascinated by southerners and their culture is that folks adore a lost cause they can empathize with. I recall reading "Little Women" when I was a girl and being struck by how distinctly non-southern it was in tone and feeling....

Sorry. These d-----computers often post twice.

Oh, I agree with woodnymph. I love the way our threads take on lives of their own and wander everywhere.

I also agree with you, Frieda, that "southern novel" conjures up certain misconceptions. Remember that I live in Kentucky where one is expected to be either a rich horse farm owner from the Bluegrass or a barefoot hillbilly from the mountains.