HEART IN DIXIE

In Bouler’s debut novel, a reporter is tasked with covering the legacy of an infamous segregationist Southern politician and unravels the man’s—and the South’s—controversial past. 

It’s 1999 when word gets out that Thomas Jefferson Davis, the four-time governor of the fictional Southern state of Escambia, is about to die, and reporter Rebecca Tanner is dispatched from Atlanta to cover the story. Davis rose to political prominence in the late 1950s by advocating for a restoration of Southern pride—and for segregation. In 1968, Davis parlayed his popularity into a presidential bid and did better than any other third-party candidate in modern American history. Some view his imprint on Escambia’s politics as a stain—a last gasping effort to maintain the bigoted supremacy of the white man. However, Gordon Halt, a well-known conservative journalist from a prominent newspaper family—his father ran an important periodical and won the Pulitzer Prize—saw Davis’ efforts as an attempt to preserve a way of life that, since the Civil War, had unjustly been under attack: “Gordon’s only goal had been to influence the Davis message on two points: that neither side, North or South, had perfect knowledge of what was best for the negro people and that the South had a special culture and way of life that deserved to be respected at the same time that its faults were addressed.” Then Tanner stumbles upon old recordings of interviews conducted with Billy Trask, Davis’ close aide, which seem to reveal that the governor turned a blind eye to, and may have quietly encouraged, violently racist groups that supported his political aspirations.  Bouler adroitly weaves together two literary genres—a historical novel that’s clearly inspired by the infamous political career of Alabama Gov. George Wallace and a suspenseful crime drama. The story is full of delicately drawn characters: Halt, for example, is a staunch defender of a world that he despondently sees as vanishing, but he also squeamishly remembers the darker side of Davis as well as his own acrimonious political split with his father, who refused to support the governor. Tanner, meanwhile, is a natural reporter—intellectually curious and scrupulously rigorous—but she’s also young, a Midwesterner, and full of her own unexamined biases about the South. In the grand tradition of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Bouler anatomizes the entire history of the region, assessing its fatal flaws and its singular strengths. What emerges is not merely a sensitive, open-minded account of history, but also a profound reflection on the extraordinary difficulty of such historical remembrance. As Halt defensively observes: “It was a complicated time. I’m sure if he were not lying unconscious in that hospital, Governor Davis would say that he followed the people in that regard, more than he led them. But it’s a complex story. And it was half a century ago.” Overall, the author’s effort offers a rare combination of fictional daring and philosophical restraint. 

A startlingly insightful and moving tale of the power and nebulousness of the past.