A Congress of Wonders

Rating:
Summary: A gem of a collection reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor
Review: One could make the case that it's only natural that Ed McClanahan knows how to tell a good story, with rich, endearing characters. After all, he comes from the same regional stock that gave us Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and William Faulkner. Maybe it's something in the water.

Whatever it is, it works in spades for McClanahan in this collection of three related short stories set in Kentucky during and just after World War II. A finer collection of characters will not be found, and McClanahan has the same gift that O'Connor did of letting the characters lead the action. One major difference, however, between O'Connor and McClanahan is this: O'Connor's characters always seem to have an undercurrent of anger and bitterness in them, while McClanahan's are open and honest and funny. These stories are a mix of elegant writing and down-home talking that is a joy. I quote extensively from the opening of the first story:

"Welcome to Burdock County, hails the peeling roadside billboard out at the county line, The Asparagus Bed of the Commonwealth. "Not that anyone in Burdock County actually grows asparagus in any noteworthy quantity; we're in tobacco country here, and asparagus makes, at best, an indifferent smoke. It's rather that the noble vegetable is reputed to insist upon the choice spot in the garden for itself, and civic-minded Burdock Countians like to suppose they're at least as discriminating as a stalk of asparagus.

"At what is purported to be at once the highest point of ground and the exact geographical center of the county, the Burdock County courthouse, an ash-gray pile of colonaded, crenellated stucco, bulks exceeding large, with the village of Needmore, nine hundred citizens strong, abjectly huddled round it, and the wrinkled hills and dales of Burdock County tumbling off to the four horizons like a vast unmade bed. Until recently, the predominant color in this great rumpled patchwork vista would have been green - the bosky verdure of woods and thickets, the paler shades of meadows and cornfields and tobacco patches - but the harvest season's over now, and the first frost has come and gone; and on this day - a certain fine late October Sunday afternoon in 1941 - the orange and dun and russet hues of autumn are in the ascendancy.

"Atop the courthouse, that imposing eyesore, is situated yet another imposing eyesore: a bulbous, beehive-shaped cupola with four clock faces the size of mill wheels, each asserting with all the authority of its hugeness four entirely different times of day. Two sides of the clock have, in fact, long since concluded that being right twice a day is better than never being right at all and have taken their stands at, respectively, 9:14 and 7:26. The remaining pair toil on, not in tandem but quite independently, one gaining several seconds every hour, the other just as resolutely losing them. There is, moreover, a bell in the clock tower that has a timetable all its own and is liable to toll midnight at three in the morning and noon at suppertime. The dedicated public servants in the courthouse learned long ago to ignore altogether the two broken clocks and the bell and to come to work by the slow clock and knock off by the fast one. They regard their singular timepiece as a labor-saving device and treasure it accordingly."

I would sacrifice body parts to write like that.

It apparently doesn't come easily to McClanahan, either. His first book, which took twenty years to write, is called The Natural Man, published in the mid-1980s, when McClanahan was 50. This is his second novel. It's not that he wasn't busy. McClanahan's biography says that the Kentucky native studied at Stanford, where he apparently hooked up with Ken Kesey and became one of his Merry Pranksters, joining Neal Cassady, Wendell Berry, Timothy Leary and Larry McMurtry. He has written many non-fiction pieces for Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone and others, some of which were collected in Famous People I Have Known. He's won dozens of writing awards. The central character, if he can be called such, in A Congress of Wonders is a traveling con artist named Philander Cosmo Rexroat, "B.S., M.S., Pee Aitch Dee." Rexroat brings a touch of magic to these stories, which are different from each other, although each introduces us to tragic, comic characters who face absurdity squarely. These three little jewels are framed beautifully in this work, and, if we have to wait another 15 years for the next book, it'll be worth the wait.