The Books of the States: Louisiana (9 electoral votes; Guest: Peter Charles Melman)

Louisiana, with almost as much per capita power in book-writing (and book-inspiring) as music-making, is one of those midsize states where you could fill up their book delegation with strictly iconic material. And god knows if I was doing the choosing that's what we'd end up with: a list of books you all could nod and say you'd heard of and maybe even read. So my thanks to Peter Charles Melman, our guest nominator for the Pelican State (can't a state as lively as Louisiana do better than that for a nickname?), for finding the right balance between familiar but undeniable and lesser-known but necessary. Even if he did knock my dear, dear Moviegoer off the list at the last moment: that's ice cold, Pete.

Pete was born in New York and has recently moved back there as part of the Great Brooklyn Writer Migration of the 00s, but he spent his teens in Lafayette, LA, and returned there for grad school in writing. And he returned again in his first novel, Landsman, a boisterous story of a rogue's redemption during the Civil War, sparked by his learning (from one of our other guest nominators, Tony Horwitz, as it happens) of the many Jews who fought for the Confederacy. (You can read our Q&A on the book from last year.) Here's his guided tour of literary Louisiana:

• The Awakening by Kate Chopin: Certainly literature has the power to move and delight, but I find that few novels actually deserve to be called "important." Chopin's novella, The Awakening, however, is as important a piece of fiction as you'll likely come across. Written in 1899, it details the emotional dislocation of Edna Pontellier, a woman so oppressed by the Creole Victorian culture into which she's married that she possesses neither the vocabulary to express her need for independence, nor the ability to truly understand it. Tragic, beautiful, and yep, important.
• The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld by Herbert Asbury: Thank God for Herbert Asbury, the unapologetic yellow journalist from the 1930s who, a few years before publishing this masterpiece on the bawdiness and tawdriness of the Vieux Carré, wrote The Gangs of New York. Asbury never met a descriptive adjective he didn't like, and his obvious love for dirty sex, tainted booze, pistol-whippings, and municipal corruption makes for a rollicking good time. Everything you ever wanted to know about the history of New Orleans depravity, but were afraid to ask your parish priest.
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole: While we're thanking God, let's show Him some appreciation for Walker Percy. Now, while his The Moviegoer came close to making my list — and I'm sure some will howl that it didn't — I do think it's critical to mention him. If for nothing else than for the wisdom he showed in humoring John Kennedy Toole's mother and actually reading, then publishing, the yellowed manuscript she planted on his desk at LSU. That manuscript was her dead son's sprawling novel, and would one day become, among other things, the most purchased used book at the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan. A Confederacy of Dunces is everything you've heard it to be: masterfully, if maniacally, crafted, at times offensive, at times tender, poignant as hell, ferociously funny. And if you've ever eaten a Bourbon Street Lucky Dog at 3:00 a.m., and have lived to tell about it, you know full well that Ignatius J. Reilly's fetishism is well-justified.
• Dancing After Hours by Andre Dubus: Andre Dubus could write. Goddamn, could he write. It doesn't matter that he spent much of his adult life in Massachusetts, where he died too young at 62; he was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, grew up in my adopted-hometown of Lafayette, and a few of the stories in this marvelous collection are set there, so in my book, he's a Louisiana boy, through and through. True, many of Dubus's themes flirt with conventionalism — adultery, faith, guilt — but the subtlety and sophistication with which he engages them lets you know immediately you're reading a master. What's more, literature runs rich in his family veins: his cousin, James Lee Burke, author of the Edgar Award-winning Dave Robicheaux mystery series, certainly deserves mention, as does his son, Andre Dubus III, author of the National Book Award finalist, House of Sand and Fog.
• Bloodline by Ernest J. Gaines: Since we're discussing short story collections, I've got to acknowledge Nobel Prize-nominee and my former thesis adviser at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, Ernest J. Gaines. As laconic as a stump, yet warmly so, Mr. Gaines offers in Bloodline a glimpse into one African-American community's struggle to maintain dignity in a world that would have otherwise. Mr. Gaines's "The Sky is Gray," an abbreviated bildungsroman of sorts, perhaps best typifies his work: regional in its style, universal in its ambition. When reading his work, you can almost feel Gaines's hope that whatever integrity he possesses — and he possesses much, I assure you — will flow ungoverned from his fountain pen onto his yellow legal pad (his preferred method of writing).
• The Civil War Diary of Clara Solomon by Clara Solomon: I came across Elliott Ashkenazi's edited Civil War Diary of Clara Solomon while researching a project of my own, and was shocked to discover that the sixteen-year-old Sephardic Jewess, Clara Solomon, was as neurotic as any youth of today, if about four hundred times as eloquent. My God, the phrases this girl was capable of crafting; mind you, many of them are as purple as the languorous Louisiana dusk, heaving with cloudbursts over the all-too-parched earth, but often gorgeously so. That said, for an account of civilian life in New Orleans before and during the Civil War, especially if for some arcane reason you happen to be seeking to view it through a Jewish lens, there can't be a finer resource.
• Alligator Sue by Sharon Arms Doucet and Anne Wilsdorf: Beyond the fact that a copy of this State Library of Louisiana Young Readers' Choice Award is inscribed to my one-year-old son, Charles Vilmos, by "[his] Louisiana friend, Sharon Arms Doucet," Alligator Sue delightfully calls into question just who we are and how we let others define us. De rigueur for young reading, perhaps, but any story with a heroine named Suzanne Marie Sabine Chicot Thibodeaux — Sue, for short — who gets raised by Mama Coco, a particularly forgiving alligator, is absolutely worth sharing. Just ask Charles Vilmos.
• A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler: Although I can see how some might consider Bob Butler's voicey, 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection to be cultural poaching, the Vietnamese immigrant population he appropriates in Good Scent generally comes across as lovingly and sensitively embraced. These stories are tender and sincere, and "Fairy Tale," one of the best in the collection, tackles head-on the worn trope of White Man Saves Non-White Whore in a way that, despite the odds, works wonderfully. Aside from setting the stories in Louisiana, Butler taught at McNeese State University in Lake Charles from 1985 to 2000, over a decade after serving as an intelligence office in the Vietnam War.
• All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren: Folks in Louisiana still like their politics, though without the same passion for the heretical that they used to. As a result, no discussion of Louisiana, either of its literature or of its politics, is complete without honoring Robert Penn Warren’s brilliant roman à clef, All the King's Men. Based on irreverent governor Huey P. Long's life, as seen through the guise of fictional Willie Stark, Penn Warren's novel is as much an investigation of the classical notion of hubris as it is mid-twentieth century Louisianan politics.  In short, it's not to be missed, even if the novel itself is anything but short. At 600 pages, Penn Warren, professor at LSU from 1933 to 1942, makes you earn it. Still, if you're not sure your attention span can handle a tome that thick, give a listen to ol' Willie: "Dirt's a funny thing, come to think of it, there ain't a thing but dirt on this green God's globe except what's under water, and that's dirt too. It's dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain't a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt." Ah yes, Southern literature.

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

Comments

[Aging Lit Major on October 10, 2008 at 05:27 AM]

I would have thought Walker Percy and The Movie-Goer would have been at the top of the list, or at least between Kate Chopin and John Kennedy Toole. Perhaps Alabama will claim Percy, since that's where he was born, or Mississippi, where he also lived. That's the thing about these lists--these writers get around and many can be claimed by more than one state.

[KristiC on October 10, 2008 at 10:44 AM]

Great list. As an honorable mention, I nominate Nancy Lemann's splendiferously nutty, lyrical, and funny New Orleans novel "Lives of the Saints".

[Dale on October 12, 2008 at 06:37 AM]

No Anne Rice? Lestat will not be pleased...

[ajax32 on October 16, 2008 at 08:24 AM]

Also, no James Lee Burke, whose Dave Robicheaux defines Louisiana for me.

[Pete on October 16, 2008 at 03:09 PM]

Actually, ajax32, you'll see I give James Lee Burke his due credit in the DANCING AFTER HOURS blurb. Helluva mystery writer, James Lee, with a terrific eye for setting.

[JMW on October 30, 2008 at 12:46 PM]

re: Percy

(howl)

[stephan on October 30, 2008 at 07:54 PM]

If you wanted to be adventurous, you could've chosen a novel by Walker Percy other than The Moviegoer -- the Second Coming, say -- but to ignore Percy completely? It's like finding a way around Lincoln in a survey of Illinois.

James Wilcox's Modern Baptists also deserves mention.