Boy with Loaded Gun: A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: Nordan's double helping of alcoholism, fantasy, and loss
Review: Lewis "Buddy" Nordan writes a memoir -- sort of.

Often times his memoir reads like a tell-all tale, and at other times like a novel about Nordan himself. The line between fact and fiction is rather hard to ascertain. Boy with Loaded Gun is difficult to pigeonhole into any traditional classification. However, fans will be pleased and new readers will be amazed with his eighth book.

Nordan confesses to cooking up conversations, changing names, and exaggerating. What's left is an immanently readable, laugh your head right off, story about growing up in the Mississippi Delta town of Itta Bena and the haywire adulthood Nordan lived upon leaving Mississippi in the 1940s and 50s.

For Nordan aficionados, the book touches on the perennial themes of his fiction. Beginning with his first collection of short stories published by LSU Press in 1983 Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair, to his most recent novel Lighting Song, loneliness and grief take center stage, along with a double helping of alcoholism, fantasy, and a Gothic sense of doom and loss.

What makes Nordan's writing engaging is a sense of redemption. His characters are on a quest somewhat like the wayfarers Louisiana novelist Walker Percy wrote about. For Nordan, humor makes suffering and pain bearable.

The memoir begins with the early death of his father when Nordan was a baby. Soon his mother would remarry, this time to a drunk. Nordan's stepfather came home each day from work to retire to his bedroom, where he would drink beer until sleep. Each morning he'd awake to ritual puking. Unfortunately, Nordan followed in his stepfather's footsteps.

He was a bizarre teen, one often obsessed with sex and other fantasies. As a teenager, Nordan ordered a military surplus pistol from the back pages of a magazine and attempted to bushwhack his stepfather in cold blood. The gun mysteriously jammed; thus saving the boy from murder and providing a title for the book.

After a stint in the Navy, Nordan attended the Methodist Millsaps College in Jackson, where he found easy sex in the parking lot outside the women's dormitory. He and his partner quickly and ludicrously eloped. In graduate school, he bummed around with hippies, did drugs, lived on a farm, and had illicit trysts with the first real hippie he met. This was a life far removed from the confines of Itta Bena, though his departure wasn't far from the rural South. Dissipation, it seems, can be found in the remotest hamlets of the Bible Belt, even around Auburn, Alabama, where he studied for the Ph.D. in English.

The memoir has all the components of a good southern novel. It's sprinkled with drunkards, midgets, racial angst over the Emmett Till lynching, pathological liars, sexual perversion, and even an unclaimed corpse that is kept on display for several decades at a Mississippi funeral home.

In one of the book's saddest moments, Nordan's college-aged son committed suicide. Years earlier, a child by his first wife died at birth. Perhaps the suicide served as a catalyst for the author to finally grow up. It appears that Nordan eventually learned to take responsibility and to call his grief by name.

The story ends with a surreal book tour stop in New Orleans, the land of dreamy dreams. By then Nordan was a published author and teacher of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, remarried and reconciled with wife number two, and on the wagon.

Readers may learn more than they wish about the real Buddy Nordan.

No, readers will love this book, and not just long-time Nordan fans. They won't love it because of his now public failures, but because he's got the guts to tell the tale, and because of the life-affirming laughter in every page. As always, Nordan writes beautifully, even if he had to jumble up the facts to avoid being sued.

-------------Reviewed by Dayne Sherman

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Summary: Nordan's quirky journey.
Review: Lewis "Buddy" Nordan's quirky life journey makes an entertaining memoir. His story picks up with Nordan at roughly age two, and with the death of his father, then ends with a moment of insightful midlife tears "for everyone, for all the madness in the world" (p. 285). In the first few pages of his book, Nordan immerses us in the "lonely backwaters" (p. 7) of the Mississippi Delta, where Nordan first lived as a boy amidst "wild pecan and tupelo gum, turtles on every half-sunken log, cottonmouth moccasins draped on every green twig of willow, alligators mooing like cows from their fecund nests" (p. 11). From his mother, we soon learn that, as a boy, Buddy was an "odd child" and a "nervous child."

In this book, however, Nordan proves that he is now a talented writer, still with an unusual slant on life. His writing here will make you smile, then bring you down in an instant. Nordan has the ability to make us laugh at life, just before breaking our hearts. Nordan's memories are episodic in this book, and include unforgettable encounters with a voodoo-practicing babysitter, a circus midget his stepfather once dated, a ventriloquist's dummy also named Buddy, a mail-order .38 revolver, and New York beatniks. "Beatniks hung out in coffeehouses," Nordan writes, "drank espresso, played bongos, read poetry aloud. Poetry seemed better than tarantulas and penguins. I believed I could learn to drink coffee. With enough sugar and milk, I could do it" (pp. 87-88).

He also recalls in detail his lust for a Shakespeare-reading, "amazing" hippie girl, coping with a friend "too crazy" even for him, and naming the tomatoes growing in his garden: "The first tomato each year was always named Elvis, and the second was always Priscilla" (p. 187). Nordan revisits, too, painful incidents in his life--a barbershop haircut for a funeral, his two marriages troubled with infidelities, his son's suicide, which left him "tongue-tied and inarticulate" (p. 212), and hitting "low bottom."

This book may not appeal to everyone, but Nordan's quirky journey will make you smile, laugh, then cry.

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: I really dig this guy
Review: This is a great book for anyone who is a fan of Lewis "Buddy" Nordan. In his Memoir, the reader is invited into the reality behind his fiction, seeing where all his wonderful and vivid characters come from. Nordan's story is a valuable contribution to all writers in the way it shows the evolution of his own life. This, however, is not a Nordan starter book. Without knowing Sugar Mecklin, Runt, and Hydro, the effect of the book is not as powerful. If you've never read this wonderful author, find him as soon as you can. His writing is a true joy to read. I can't recomend it enough.

Rating:
Summary: good...not great
Review: This was the first I had read of Lewis Nordan, and I wasn't overly impressed.

I whipped through the first section about his (or should I say "Buddy's") childhood. After that, the book slows down. It becomes increasingly difficult to identify or sympathize with the problems and eccentricities of this young man as he comes of age. Buddy consistently fails to learn from his mistakes and the lack of growth is frustrating as a reader.

Still, I'll probably pick up another Nordan book to see if I like it any better.