Description:
"It is impossible to make sense out of stories that purport to be true," Ellen Douglas writes in the recollections she titles, perhaps ironically, Truth. "Something is always missing. To give them form, extract their deepest meaning, one has to turn them into fiction, to find causes, or if, as is usually the case, causes are unfindable, one has to invent them." But in these four anecdotes taken from her family's past, Douglas is determined to avoid invention altogether. The author of seven masterful books of fiction set in her native Mississippi, here Douglas only flirts with the fictional possibilities of her tale and then lays them aside. Instead, she patiently unsnarls the complicated strands of history, rumors, secrets, and outright lies that make up what we typically call "memory"--and what publishers typically call "the memoir." In "Grant," she chronicles her own abandonment of a dying uncle as well as his complicated relationship with the beautiful black woman who cares for him. "Julia and Nellie" explores the social and religious consequences for two cousins who live for years as man and wife, while in "Hampton," her family's longtime black servant stubbornly resists all her attempts to imagine her way into his life. The final story, "On Second Creek," knits together the book's overarching themes--familial secrets, race, religion, the unreliability of memory--into the story of an 1861 massacre, when local landowners hanged 30 slaves they suspected of plotting an uprising. The least of Truth's many pleasures is the way it bears grave, unsentimental witness to a mostly vanished or vanishing South. When the family friend Miss Adah says dismissively of Natchez that it "isn't a real town, is it? ... Faulkner might have invented it," Douglas can only reply, yes, but it's also where I grew up. "Think first, not of Tara and hoopskirts and ruthless Southern belles," she advises the reader, "but rather of churches, bells ringing for Sunday services and Wednesday night prayer meeting, of ladies and gentlemen and children in worn but respectable clothing." Douglas possesses a novelist's eye for detail--for instance, the bees that swarm at her uncle's death--and an unerring ear for the way Southerners actually speak. But, at age 78, what she has above all is a lifetime's worth of story-making, and the sense that now it is time to give the sources of her fiction their due. The result is an unusually subtle and perceptive look at the way we tell stories as well as the often-elliptical relation these stories have to truth. --Mary Park
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