In a Temple of Trees: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Alll Southerners Should Read...
Review: 12-year-old Cecil Durgin witnesses a foul deed late one night at a secluded hunting lodge, where a group of powerful local white men gather to play what is euphemistically called "The Game". The year is 1958, the place, deep in the West Alabama woods. The night is filled with loud music and the drunken howls of a small group of hunters who enjoy their hunt and their privacy, drinking them selves into oblivion after a successful kill. Then they unleash their deviant sexual urges on the flesh of a young woman hired for the occasion. These men want no witnesses to their depravity.

Cecil, an African-American who works at the camp, retires to the skinning shed after his chores are finished, hoping for a well-earned sleep, but he wakes to the sound of music and raucous laughter. He has been warned to give the drunken white men wide berth, lest he attract their notice and their ire, but can't resist taking a peek. The horrific act that he witnesses torments Cecil for decades to come. These same privileged hunters haunt Cecil's past and menace the present.

Times change, as does the nature of politics. As a mature man, Cecil finds himself in a position to serve as a spokesperson for the black community, as a preacher and a radio station owner-announcer. Fearless and outspoken, Cecil has a particular power of his own and is therefore a problem for the same men who were present at the hunting camp all those years ago; they are older now, but still well off and powerful. Cecil is a constantly visible threat to their assiduously protected reputations. True to form, the men return to time-honored methods of persuasion, hiring the white-sheeted Klan members whenever they have a need for intimidation. Grown tired of his ancient burden, Cecil is unwilling to bow before these hypocrites even one more time.

This isn't Faulkner's South, quiet, shaded porches dripping with ennui. This is the everyday reality of racism, without romanticizing the seductive charm of the South. This place has a dark history of violence, where black men are hung and with impunity, their children routinely terrorized, homes and churches torched, all to teach them their place. Everything ugly is hidden beneath the facade of genteel mannerisms. The evil that lives in this town is deeply rooted, nurtured in the moist soil of prejudice. Such dank growth is contaminated by its deformity, bitterly feeding on man's lowest impulses, imbued with a twisted Darwinian intent. While this life is often vile and brutal, it is also tempered with shockingly tender moments.

In a Temple of Trees is an important novel, a story of a privileged few who callously crush the innocent, protected by their wealth, hiring arrogant misogynists to do their dirty work. The puppet masters pull the strings while their blank-eyed marauders dance in the firelight, a ghostly band of faceless terrorists. Hudson's portrayal of the Klan is so realistic that the white-sheeted cowards' ignorant, race-baiting remarks shimmer against the page, defiling all human dignity with their snickering bravado. The scent of blood lust remains even now, tainting the air with the foul fumes of racist dogma.

Unflinching, Hudson creates her own effigy of these straw men, her fluent prose effectively burning them at the stake. In the light of day they are exposed for the shameless bullies they are, capable of performing only under the cover of night. In this story, at least this once, truth prevails over ignominy. And at the core of it all, one ill-used woman from long ago begs Cecil for respite. He yearns only to accomplish this one thing: to bring her peace at last. Proudly, this impressive author talks back to years of history, of blistering intolerance and terrible deeds, without ever raising her voice. I extend my profound gratitude to Suzanne Hudson, for purging my mute impotence with her extraordinary vision and her clarity. Luan Gaines/2003.

Rating:
Summary: Terrific First Novel
Review: A well-written, powerful book full of mystery, sexual and racial tension, and redemption. I must confess I'm not certain (and I've read the entire book) why several quotes on the back of the book indicate this book is infused with humor (black or otherwise), it's not. Oh, and it's all but ruined (hence the four stars instead of five) by an inexcusable misspelling of Lynyrd Skynyrd on page 229.

Rating:
Summary: Terrific First Novel
Review: A well-written, powerful book full of mystery, sexual and racial tension, and redemption. I must confess I'm not certain (and I've read the entire book) why several quotes on the back of the book indicate this book is infused with humor (black or otherwise), it's not. Oh, and it's all but ruined (hence the four stars instead of five) by an inexcusable misspelling of Lynyrd Skynyrd on page 229.

Rating:
Summary: a refreshing & intelligent debut
Review: Reviewed by Krista McGruder for Small Spiral Notebook

In A Temple of Trees by Suzanne Hudson is refreshing and intelligent in the author's refusal to bow to the namby-pamby literary review chorus. This chorus is sung in praise of novels that shade all the characters with goodness and badness, incorporating review buzzwords such as compassionate and humanizing without any justification for the normative value of that authorial inclination (other than not to offend the purchasing public.) Praise of a literary author's "compassion" toward humanity is already a cliché and is close to becoming a pandemic love-fest, in which no humans-fictional or otherwise-are ever condemned or ever to blame because, hey, we should recognize there's an evil in all of us and while we're at it, please pass the syrupy milk of human kindness.

Thank god or the muse-take your pick-for Suzanne Hudson. Her novel, In A Temple of Trees, a break from her long writing hiatus, features bad characters. Meaning, characters that behave badly, characters that are more flawed than good and characters that are evil. Meaning, also, the author has shrugged off the contemporary literary requirement that novels should underscore humanity and limn motivations in the socio-economic context of youth and while we're at it, what about that relationships with mother?

Whatever. And what a relief that this talented Southern woman has produced a good fire and brimstone type fiction that doesn't shirk from judging who's a sinner and who's a saint. Temple contains villains and good people and saves plenty of nuance for the ones in between. For nuance, Suzanne Hudson focuses primarily on the life of Cecil Durgin, a man who struggles with fidelity toward his wife but who also acts out of conviction in his efforts to bring out the black vote for local causes.

Cecil's story begins in Alabamian timber baron Big John McCormick's deer camp. For those unfamiliar with Southern male hunting rituals, a "deer camp" is usually a cabin tucked deep into the woods outfitted with a card table, latrine, kitchen and in these days, an audio-video system to help pass the time when not crouched in a deer blind. Befitting the era and setting of the early parts of Temple, Big John's buddies come to the camp prepared with dogs, guns and liquor. And of course, the help. The help consists of an older black man who cooks and a "mixed" boy named Cecil Durgin. Of uncertain paternity, Cecil has been adopted by a local couple in which the wife, Miss Sophie Price, is Jewish. After spying on the sex games between the white adult hunters and the white women hired for the purpose, Cecil discovers her dead body and informs Big John. Miss Charity's death will metaphorically and literally haunt Cecil throughout his adulthood.

Cecil's adulthood is set in 1990, again in Three Breezes, Alabama. He is married, his children have grown and left. Cecil owns the radio station his adoptive father had operated. Cecil's admonitions to his listeners are the source of political trouble for the good ole' boys running Big John McCormick's timber trust. Hudson manufactures the local political intrigue and jockeying deftly, framing out conflict with specific scenes to illustrate the persistence of small-town political muscle jobs that can carry large financial consequence.

Concurrent with Cecil's marital and potentially dangerous political dilemma are the moral struggles of other characters including Sophie Price, his wife, Earline and his long-time friend, a white woman named Shug who is part-heir to the timber fortune. Cecil's mistress, a velvet-throated crooner who calls herself Honey, falls into misadventure and the tale of her ordeal is both screamingly funny and grim. Even the ghost of the dead young woman makes appearances, tempering the scenes with reminders that Cecil's past walks the walk with his present.

Hudson writes local color and details that make her "bad" characters easy-if not fun-to imagine. Included in the raft of good ole' boys are Big John's hunting contingent (among them a friend and confidant who had relations with his daughter,) Shug's husband and a comic-relief duo of brother criminals. Hudson's exceptional at assigning identity to each of the characters. Though all white and all bad, we never confuse the embezzler with the kidnapper, the hinted-at-gay good ole' boy with the waspy, porn-loving, Christian financial manager.

Temple doesn't shrink from the elephant in the room. Race and issues of racial paternity command as much stage time as the characters and dramatic conflict. Notions of family and friendship are strained over the facts of Cecil's paternity; both his black and white families are reluctant to tell what they know as truth. Bitterness runs deep on both sides of the white and black family branches.

If Temple has any soft spots, it lies in Hudson's dedication to preserving dialect and speech mannerisms. Though accuracy in depiction has always been a strong suit of Southern writers, she opens herself to potential criticism that she's writing the "stock" evil white man or the "cliché" rich, drunken and imperious Southern widow. I didn't find the characterizations to be a problem, but that's probably because I've spent too much time arguing with Northern literary critics that despite their claims of hunters and belles being "caricatures," people in the South...really...do....talk...like...that. And act like that too.

Readers should enjoy Hudson's novel, if not only for the unraveling of its decades-long mystery but for a tour through the woods of the South, where they'll encounter "The faint smell of must wool, cedar-chipped smoke, and sticky sap...."

And also bad guys. No-possibility-of-compassion-or-humanizing bad guys.



Rating:
Summary: Hard Comedy, Harder Facts
Review: Suzanne Hudson's recent novel, In a Temple of Trees, is knockout. Just how good a writer is Hudson? She turns a sexual encounter between a white male abductor and his black female abductee into twenty-three of the funniest pages you'll ever read. Brothers and sisters, if that doesn't take writing skill, then my childhood cracker name wasn't Billy Joe.
Those two themes, racism and sexism, predominate the remainder of the novel in a much more serious manner, however. When the Klan appears days after a young black boy named Cecil, witnesses a murder at a white hunting camp, the novel turns as haunted as it was comic. Cecil is sexually debased before the Klan, as is his adopted white Jewish mother. Her reaction? "It was then that she let the fire have her, curling into the bowels of it as if it were some glowing embryonic membrane silencing the world."
Set on the Alabama-Mississippi border, the novel's spine revolves around Cecil's reaction, his enduring memory of the rape-murder at the camp. When he witnessed it, he was an apprentice cook for five white men. The men have brought a young woman from over the state line to "entertain" them for the night. When matters turn nasty, young Cecil, who's been befriended by the woman earlier that day, is at a loss to help her. -Guilt over his lack of any helpful reaction haunts Cecil for thirty-two years. Here the plot thickens, for Cecil's inherited a radio station from his adopted white parents (one a Jew, remember, so an outcast in her own manner). And-this should sound familiar to Alabamians-a statewide voter referendum on charging timber companies realistic taxes is forthcoming. Cecil's radio station reaches several pivotal counties where the black vote could swing matters. So . . .
Hudson is a master of intertwining suspense, tone, and scenes into a plot that will keep you reading throughout the night. And her characters are so real that you might want to sit with a canister of mace to keep some of them at bay.

Rating:
Summary: A Triple Shot of Justice, Faith, and Violence - Incredible!
Review: There are about a dozen books out there that I wish I had written. The Stranger by Albert Camus, William Gay's The Long Home, Larry Brown's Facing the Music, Tom Franklin's Poachers, among others. All of Cormac McCarthy's alien fiction-alien in that a flesh and bone man could not have written it. Flannery O'Connor, Lewis Nordan, Katherine Anne Porter, Tobias Wolff, Rick Bragg, Harry Crews, Raymond Carver, Tim Gautreaux, are other writers that I envy. I wish I had been the person writing the first draft of a number of good books.

But now I have one more author, one more prose artist to wish I had breathed her words into being. Before her, the words were not. Because of her, the words are. That simple. That amazing. In a Temple of Trees is one of the kindest and harshest of novels I've ever read. It is a triple shot of justice, faith, and violence. Its pages shook me when I read them.

What bothers me the most-and I have a feeling that you will hear more about this-is that an awful lot of the story is utterly true to actual events, the murder of a young mother of a brood of kids.

Incredible reading. I highly recommend this novel and Suzanne Hudson's other work, Opposable Thumbs, as well.

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

Rating:
Summary: WOW!!
Review: This a great book. Ms. Hudson's writing is very aggressive and very hard to believe it comes from a female. Many of the same tones as A Time to Kill but with a must harder edge. It's not a PG13 book. It's a quick and great read. You will not be disappointed.