THE RED TRUCK

by Rudy Wilson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 22, 1987

Here's a short first novel that demands, and merits, rereading--one of those dense and difficult books you grow to admire as its complex structure slowly reveals its purpose and meaning. Only in this case, it's hard to accept the notion that seems to support the strange edifice--a sense of reincarnation that's part Faulknerian eternal recurrence and part Shirley MacLaineish hokum. Billy-Billy Jump and Teddianne Sayers, two peculiarly obsessed children of the modern South, ""grow down,"" not up, 300 miles apart in rural Mississippi. What they share, and what draws these kindred spirits together in young adulthood, is a mystical inwardness that results from their intimate experiences of death: Billy-Billy's younger brother suffocates when they both accidently lock themselves in an old icebox; and Teddianne witnesses her brother's fatal attempt to fly from a tree. Given to breathing fits and insomnia, Billy-Billy further withdraws from the world when his beloved Mama K, his religious old granny, dies, leaving the 19-year-old with an inchoate longing for Jesus. Teddianne's vision of Christ--embodied in a red truck--comes with her mother's death-rattle. Like her unmet soul mate, she retreats into herself and an inner world fashioned from books and chartered by maps much like the ones cluttering Billy-Billy's windowless room. When, halfway through the novel, these inarticulate visionaries finally come together, it's pure destiny, for she was ""born from the dreams"" of a younger Billy-Billy; and he, having served three years in jail for blinding a man, comes to see--as Teddianne's father once put it--that ""she was pulled right out of forever."" After their cosmic sexual union, these haunted youths experience the past--literally, it seems. A baffling Civil War interlude, full of madness, lust, and violence, links itself to the unfinished business of the present. Wilson's hypersensitivity to primary colors, his aberrant Biblical imagery, and his unyieldingly terse prose brilliantly serve his mournful tale of the ""damned, just damned"" innocents. Ambiguities and disbelief aside, an exceptional debut.

Pub Date: May 22, 1987

ISBN: 0982211546

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1987

Categories: FICTION