BURDEN

A genial first outing, laced with regional flavor and black humor, about a grief-stricken young man’s attempts to get himself killed in flagrante delicto.

Waterboro, South Carolina, is not quite Tobacco Road, but it is the sort of town where boys have names like “Whalie” or “Sutton” and you can laugh it off when someone takes a drunken potshot at you as a joke. And then there’s the sex: Women tend to stay at home down here, but that’s not necessarily so they can home-school their kids or make biscuits from scratch. Young Burden, the grocer’s boy, found this out once his father decided he was old enough to start making the deliveries (“it’s important,” he tells him, “that our customers stay happy customers”). First off, Dr. Whitman’s considerably younger wife Maude got it into her head one afternoon to teach Burden the facts of life—and, to the boy’s amazement, seemed not to mind repeating the lesson the following week (and each one thereafter). Pruella Boaz, herself not much older than Burden, was so bored with her trucker husband Eugene that she became a regular on Burden’s route, too. But Burden (now 23) has taken a strange turn lately, becoming more and more careless about getting out the door before the husbands return—almost as if he wanted to get caught. And there are other things: he spends more and more time visiting the grave of his cousin Peedie, who was killed during a very messed-up night he spent with Burden some years ago. There are guilt trips and there are death wishes, with sometimes not much difference between them. Oh, and Burden’s old flame Jo has come back to town, turning the thermostat up a few more degrees. As if you really need it down South.

Good sloppy fun: A well-paced, believable, and genuinely funny story that manages to make a few nice points along the way.