In the Tennessee Country : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Disappearing Act
Review: This was Peter Taylor's last novel and it begins with a mystery: "In the Tennessee country of my forebears it was not uncommon for a man of good character suddenly to disappear. He might be a very young man or a middle-aged man or even sometimes a very old man. Whatever the case, few questions were ever asked. Rather, it was generally assumed that such a man had very likely felt the urging of some inner compulsion and so could not do otherwise than gather up his chattels and move on to resettle himself elsewhere."

The narrator, Nathan Longfort, first sees his older "cousin" Aubrey in 1916 on a funeral train headed from ?Washington, D.C., back to Knoxville for the burial of Longfort's grandfather, an accomplished senator. A ward of the senator, Aubrey is also the illegitimate son of a mountain woman and the senator's brother.

The novels follows Longfort's preoccupation with, and attempts to explain, Aubrey's appearances and disappearances over the years. Longfort flashes back to his parents, his schooling, and teaching career, and his own wife and son, but he always returns to Aubrey.

For the family the death of the senator represents the fading away of an era. Aubrey takes on mythic stature. To some degree, he becomes emblematic of the modern, rootless man, created in his own image, running away from the old mouth and dispensation. Without the senator, Aubrey must make his own way in the world.

The narrative reflects this sense of dissipation. "Time is nothing," Longfort quotes a Chinese philosopher and painter. "Character and experience and precious memory is all."

A retired art professor who wanted to be an artists, Longfort shuttles between past and present, attempting to buttress piecemeal discoveries against his own motives and discontents.

In this sense the story is thoroughly modern. Where the given and fixed have been abandoned, characters become increasingly self-conscious and wayward, having become mysteries to themselves. "Gone to Texas" reads a sign on one lonely homestead. That Longfort was raised without a father merely worsens the ambiguity.

At the same time, Taylor shows that the rest of the Long fort family does little better than Aubrey in sustaining a legacy of order. The manners they claim to cherish, but abuse, confine more than they provide. To them Aubrey is simply an outsider from ignoble birth and a target for easy jokes.

An unobtrusive author, Taylor develops these conflicts and tensions, often leaving the reader, like the main characters, very much on his own. Here are two lives, each falling short in some way but each eliciting sympathy. This complexity makes them more real is a measure of Taylor's talent. With its quiet prose and nudging toward sometimes discomfiting revelation, In the Tennessee Country is a solid work.