Little Brown, 2008
"Gimme that old time religion. It’s good enough for me." So goes the old spiritual. So go my feelings about Clyde Edgerton’s newest novel, The Bible Salesman. The religious ethos of the South is inextricably linked to the plot of this ambitious bildungsroman that traces the physical and spiritual growth of one Henry Dampier.
While most bildungsroman novels offer a sequential development of character, Edgerton chooses to start in the middle of things, then move back and forth between Dampier’s childhood/youth and near adulthood. Henry, raised in the Blood of the Lamb is on the road selling Bibles. Curiously, the Bibles he is selling door-to-door have come to him in violation of the 8th Commandant. In Henry’s world you would not have to look this up; you would know that you should not steal. He writes to various Bible publishers and gets free copies so that he can distribute them to those in need. Of course, he is the one in need because he wants to make money.
A man, Preston Clearwater, who "belonged to a crime outfit" stops him on the side of the road and recruits him to join the "FBI" in stopping a ring of car thieves across the South, a way of "serving God in a different way." Henry has just begun to read the Bible on his own and is learning to think for himself so he takes the bait and joins Clearwater as they "liberate" automobiles from the perfidious thieves who have "stolen" them. Clearwater wants to work his way up the crime outfit; Henry wants to make money and help the FBI.
"Gimme that old time religion. It’s good enough for me." So goes the old spiritual. So go my feelings about Clyde Edgerton’s newest novel, The Bible Salesman. The religious ethos of the South is inextricably linked to the plot of this ambitious bildungsroman that traces the physical and spiritual growth of one Henry Dampier.
While most bildungsroman novels offer a sequential development of character, Edgerton chooses to start in the middle of things, then move back and forth between Dampier’s childhood/youth and near adulthood. Henry, raised in the Blood of the Lamb is on the road selling Bibles. Curiously, the Bibles he is selling door-to-door have come to him in violation of the 8th Commandant. In Henry’s world you would not have to look this up; you would know that you should not steal. He writes to various Bible publishers and gets free copies so that he can distribute them to those in need. Of course, he is the one in need because he wants to make money.
A man, Preston Clearwater, who "belonged to a crime outfit" stops him on the side of the road and recruits him to join the "FBI" in stopping a ring of car thieves across the South, a way of "serving God in a different way." Henry has just begun to read the Bible on his own and is learning to think for himself so he takes the bait and joins Clearwater as they "liberate" automobiles from the perfidious thieves who have "stolen" them. Clearwater wants to work his way up the crime outfit; Henry wants to make money and help the FBI.
While Henry is beginning to question the interpretations of the Bible he has been given, he is rather slow in determining what Preston is doing. Along the way, Henry wrestles (He’d say "rassels.") with the 7th and 10th Commandants while seeing no problem in using the Bibles for his own purposes. He is struggling with the first two chapter of Genesis. Why, for example, would a God who is all powerful and all knowing need to rest on the 7th day?
This pull between good and evil is a significant theme in this story. The language and the characters clearly place the story in a long ago South, making it sound as if it were only a regional novel, even though the themes are universal. Why do writers who live in the South so often get categorized simply as regional writers? Edgerton said in a recent reading, "My friend Lawrence Block (Hit and Run) said, ‘You damn Southern writers don’t have to make up anything!’ " Actually, according to Edgerton, "We have to unmake characters to make them believable. When I was at my first reading for Raney, up in the mountains of North Carolina, there were a dozen in the audience, 11 locals and one person from California. The Californian said that the characters in the novel did not and could not exist. Before I could say anything, the others ‘jumped’ him to assure him that such people did indeed exist." He went on to say that the great failing in evaluating work by Southern writers is a failure to look below the surface to the underlying themes of hope and fear.
This pull between good and evil is a significant theme in this story. The language and the characters clearly place the story in a long ago South, making it sound as if it were only a regional novel, even though the themes are universal. Why do writers who live in the South so often get categorized simply as regional writers? Edgerton said in a recent reading, "My friend Lawrence Block (Hit and Run) said, ‘You damn Southern writers don’t have to make up anything!’ " Actually, according to Edgerton, "We have to unmake characters to make them believable. When I was at my first reading for Raney, up in the mountains of North Carolina, there were a dozen in the audience, 11 locals and one person from California. The Californian said that the characters in the novel did not and could not exist. Before I could say anything, the others ‘jumped’ him to assure him that such people did indeed exist." He went on to say that the great failing in evaluating work by Southern writers is a failure to look below the surface to the underlying themes of hope and fear.
Given the vital underpinning that religion plays in this novel, will Edgerton write about the religious right and politics? "NO!" is his resounding answer. However, as he was writing this novel he was reading a lot of religious stuff and he intended the novel to cover from 1930 – 2000. He had a long section in which cats were discussing deep religious themes. For example, a cat named Isaac asked his father, Abraham, "Why did you take me up on that mountain?" His editor cut most of this out, and the timeframe changed to 1939 – 1950. It was a good change. Cats can talk through the voice of the addled old woman who owns them.
Along the way are three quintessentially Southern stories that Edgerton heard along the way and incorporated into the novel. The first involved an old lady who fell in her garden and could not get up. When the EMT crew arrived, her hands were dirty because she had pulled all the weeds within her reach. In the second instance, his mama had gotten a new red dress. A neighbor told her it looked good, that it brought out the color in her cheeks. Months passed and Mama died and was buried in the red dress. Viewing her in the casket, the neighbor said she was glad because "people get pale at a time like this." Finally, up in Ashe County (mountains of NC), "Nancy" met with Mrs. Durham as she went back and forth. After two years she was invited into Mrs. Durham’s home and asked her about Mr. Durham. She went into another room and brought back some pictures of Mr. Durham in his casket. Nancy asked, "Do you have anything a little less recent?"
Along the way are three quintessentially Southern stories that Edgerton heard along the way and incorporated into the novel. The first involved an old lady who fell in her garden and could not get up. When the EMT crew arrived, her hands were dirty because she had pulled all the weeds within her reach. In the second instance, his mama had gotten a new red dress. A neighbor told her it looked good, that it brought out the color in her cheeks. Months passed and Mama died and was buried in the red dress. Viewing her in the casket, the neighbor said she was glad because "people get pale at a time like this." Finally, up in Ashe County (mountains of NC), "Nancy" met with Mrs. Durham as she went back and forth. After two years she was invited into Mrs. Durham’s home and asked her about Mr. Durham. She went into another room and brought back some pictures of Mr. Durham in his casket. Nancy asked, "Do you have anything a little less recent?"
Now a professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Edgerton grew up in a community much like that of this protagonist. In fact, he said, he was often in a Sunday School class just like the one he describes in the novel. Asked for advice from someone in high school who wanted to be a writer, he said, "Do not follow advice that doesn’t make sense. I work from experience, what I know, my imagination. I see a wall with fictional people on one side and real people on the other. While I’m writing, the fictional people reach through the wall and borrow from the real people."
Listen to NPR's Frank Stasio's interview of Clyde Edgerton.
Listen to NPR's Frank Stasio's interview of Clyde Edgerton.
