SWEET CANE

by Bruce McGinnis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 15, 1981

In McGinnis' somewhat more impressive first novel, The Fence (1979), East Texas farmer Mavis Ansley was obsessed with a rock fence--to keep life away. Now, in a sort-of-sequel, Ansley's land has become that of the Sedleys. Once rich, then shamed, now poor and dying, Amos Sedley lies in the newspaper-wall-covered bedroom of his house and lets his meager sugar-cane crop go to hell. Son Rance runs things; sickly son Buck is humiliatingly ignored and made to feel completely worthless; youngest boy Wacker does what he can to keep the family together while it disintegrates from pride, poverty, and ignorance (but he himself is sleeping with his live-in girl-cousin Carrie. . . who's actually his sister). In fact, you'll find virtually every commonplace of white-trash, Southern-gothic fiction here. But even more enervating is McGinnis' prose--with its imitation-Faulkner-iana: ""SO what is not is no more and thus never was, resembling nothing so much as the cursory dust, forever changing shape, form, blowing back and forth through the mortal screen time into eternity, eternity into time, resisting permanence except as dust, so thus resisting life, breath, except as dust too, and lying in the field it has body, and contained in a jar, shape, and what is man's life but a kind of jar. . . . ""Down-home squalor, then, made even more unpalatable by opaque, interminable rhetoric.

Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1981

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Vanguard

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1981

Categories: FICTION