cosmic plodding

The first question asked of Southern Cross the Dog by Bill Cheng is how does one Gotham Chinese-American write convincingly about a young African-American living in the rural South if the novelist has never set foot below the Mason-Dixon line?

Defying any idea fiction writers write about what they know, Mr. Cheng has a debut novel being hyped as like Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and the towering genius of William Faulkner himself.

By his own admission, Brooklynite Mr. Cheng has, however, obsessively inhaled the Southern milieu with a devotion to that art form known as the blues. Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and others: They've taken Cheng into the South. Indeed, Cheng says the makings of his story came straight from lyrics of the blues; a great Mississippi Delta flood--so essential to the Southern experience--is but one pivotal example.

Southern Cross the Dog begins like this:

"When I was a baby child, they put the jinx on me.

"It was in my drink and food and milk. And when I ran, it heavied in my bones and when I sang, it stopped up my throat and when I loved, it let from me, hot and poisonous."

This voice of young Robert Lee Chatham, the narration that follows, the prose lines of Southern Cross the Dog are astonishingly fresh and original. Cheng has taken what he learned from studying the blues and applied it to his fiction prose. Bill Cheng doesn't hesitate to bend his words like so many blue notes.

The novel hinges on one event: the Flood of 1927. Everybody who shows up in the novel has an after-the-Flood life of unrelenting loss, and they struggle.

In years that follow, the Feds in DC authorize flood control and hydroelectric projects: dams and levees that must alter the landscape for a new South. Some of Cheng's most compassionate and poignant chapters are set among Cajun fur trappers, who lose their livelihood in the name of this progress.

Besides young Robert and fur trappers, other memorable characters populate the episodic fourteen years of Southern Cross the Dog. A blues-playing pianist, released from prison after serving time for a murder he didn't commit. A bordello madam, who employs teenage Robert, after his family abandons him. Childhood friends. bruised by life, Robert rediscovers as adults.

If I had one reservation, I would say I couldn't distinguish between the expressive voice of young protagonist Robert Lee Chatham and the authorial voice when Robert is offstage. They're the same: Cheng's. (An unFaulknerlike fault.) But putting that aside, Southern Cross the Dog is an exceptional debut novel.

Southern Cross the Dog by Bill Cheng, 2013, HarperCollins, ISBN: 978-0-06-222500-9, eISBN: 978-0-06-2225030.

5:25:13 Southern Cross the Dog: a book review

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5:25:13 Southern Cross the Dog: a book review

Read more ... (click to enlarge image)

Read more ...
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