A short history of a natural story

Natural stories must be anchored in storytelling. Even a novel that doesn’t seem to be about nature can be a natural story, when its language and themes and metaphors and structure add up.

When A Short History of a Small Place was published in 1986, most of its admirers focused on its status as a first novel. “A major new Southern novelist,” one review said of the author T.R. Pearson; “more than an impressive debut, it is an accomplishment,” said another. Looking back, I’d like to admire it as a pinnacle of storytelling.

            The book is set in a small North Carolina town in the 1970s, and narrated by a teenager named Louis Benfield. Reading it was the first time I can recall laughing out loud at a novel, the first time I was desperate to read passages aloud to anyone in the room. I reread it this summer, and it remains my choice for the funniest book of all time. Also my most influential: after the first time I read A Short History, I wanted to move to a small town and be a writer.

            The subject matter sounds rather morbid: the town’s rich doyenne commits suicide, and in the days between her first erratic behavior and her funeral, Louis’ community tries to understand. A majority of the book is a kind of journalism, with Louis constantly attributing stories (“Daddy said” or “according to Mrs. Philip J. King”) as people come to grips with current conditions by telling stories about the past. Part of the humor and much of the delight comes in Daddy’s cynicism and King’s ill-informed gossip and the way Louis softens their tales with kind forgiveness. Most of the characters are shown behaving rather poorly, but as the New York Times Book Review said, “If there is some benign God watching over us, we want Him to look upon us with the wisdom and compassion with which Mr. Pearson views his world.”

This is NOT the Pettigrew mansion described in A Short History of a Small Place, which after all is fiction. But it has a certain vibe… (courtesy Wikimedia)

            Some of the humor is zany: there’s a full-bladdered monkey in a porkpie hat, three sisters who demand that the sheriff declare them triplets, and a pigeon-poisoning scheme that falls victim to parsimony. Some humor comes at the expense of religious pomposity. There are also fat jokes and bald jokes and jokes about the existence of racial differences that may have seemed quaint or appropriate in the 1970s but now at best induce cringes. But much of the humor comes from the rhythm of language. Sentences roll on endlessly—but to my ear differ from Faulknerian density in sounding more like the product of a certain kind of oral storyteller. The sentence structures are simple. Invented patronyms (“Mr. Wade ‘Shorty’ Glidewell’s brother’s boy, Lyle”) repeat themselves in rhythmically satisfying ways. Deliciously parallel phrasings chug along like a train to set up each sentence’s final word as a punchline.

            This humor is not for everyone. Some readers complain that this 400-page book has far too many sentences that don’t really say anything. Yet to me that’s the point: nothing seemingly happens in a small town. Or in some novels. The meaning and the joy come from the people you meet, and the way you approach them. And while you’re immersed in an accumulation of anecdotes, often accompanied by exhaustively detailed family trees, you sometimes stumble upon a sort of knowledge, a realization that something did happen, and it was history. 

            There’s not a whole lot of explicit nature in the novel. One of the triplets always greets Louis with, “It’s wonderful to be out of doors, isn’t it?” There’s a delightful clash between a wealthy bird-lover and his duck-hunting white-trash neighbors. Daddy’s passionate nostalgia for badminton seems to have more to do with being in the backyard on a summer evening than the sport itself. And the final 75-word sentence is packed with imagery of nature. But long before then, this small place has been vividly captured. And like so many small towns, especially in the mid-20th century, its character and its natural setting are fully intertwined. Why are Louis and the triplet out of doors? Because they walk rather than drive. Because they live in a walkable community where few people have air conditioning.

            A Small Place is in the title because that’s what the book is about. And as “a small place” goes, so do small places that add up to big pictures. As we seek to mourn or celebrate or raise concerns about other places—those threatened by climate change, those that seem to exist in harmony with their surroundings, those that illustrate a political or socioeconomic trend—how often are we noting and mimicking their rhythms of language, or pausing to admire their seemingly irrelevant zany characters, or assembling a century’s worth of gossipy anecdotes, to fully capture such natural stories?

Notes:

• Here’s an affiliate link to A Short History of a Small Place. My Bookshop page also features a list of most the books mentioned here on Natural Stories.

• Surprisingly, I followed through on both ambitions: to move to a small town, and be a writer. Even more surprisingly, they both worked out!