Book Review : More Bad News From the Ol’ Southern Home Front

Woodrow’s Trumpet by Tim McLaurin (W. W. Norton: $17.95; 262 pages.)

This is a novel about long-standing war where the sides keep changing and the permutations are endless. Just as our World War II Pacific battle against Japan has changed so that we drive Japanese cars now, and Japanese cowboys ride the Wyoming range, “Woodrow’s Trumpet” takes another look at our own Civil War and finds that--in the North Carolina town of Oak Hills--the sides have changed, so that poor whites and blacks, and even the rich Southerners of the area, have banded together in a futile skirmish that looks like a replay of 1861-1865, but isn’t.

The piney woods, the wilderness, the pretty place that Oak Hills is has been invaded by Northerners, Northerners with a twist: That is to say, these marauders love brown, natural wood houses; they plant azaleas, they worry about the plight of the wild eagle, and they are driven by a terrible urge to procreate and clone themselves and their way of life. They absolutely must have lawns and driveways and picnics with white wine and Brie: They are not Abolitionists, but rather suburbanites, and they will not stop until the whole of America is sliced up into split levels and--to paraphrase some long-gone President--there’s a Volvo in every garage.

No Longer Protected

The South, the author suggests, has been protected from this phenomenon for a long time by its very poverty and strife. For years, Southern whites have cheerfully exploited Southern blacks, who have in turn lived in abject degradation. The post-Civil War Rich (for Faulkner, the Snopes; for McLaurin, the Bunce Family), have been too hard-working, rednecked, and pig-headed to take a look around and see what’s happening now . . .

At a personal level, the story concerns Ellis, a white-trash orphan growing up in a boys’ home in Oak Hills, Nadean, a reformed black heroin addict who’s lived a tough life in Washington, and come home now and also Woodrow Bunce, the youngest of the three greedy brothers--except that Woodrow isn’t greedy at all. When old Mrs. Bunce dies, she leaves the great preponderance of Bunce Land to the two older brothers who promptly sell it off for subdivision.

In come the Northerners with their cedar siding and their Brie. Woodrow keeps his own patch of land at the top of the hill, grows watermelons, takes up with Nadean in the face of adverse public-opinion, and for a birthday present to his beloved, decides to plant a palm tree in the middle of these oaks, build some fake sand dunes, and throw in some plastic flamingoes.

People care much more about their property than their great loves, their education, or anything else. No less a literary personage than Leanard, Woolf, Virginia’s husband, has said this, and everyone knows it’s true. Spouses come and go; children often turn off badly, but your azaleas are supposed to be forever.

The Battle Begins

To combat the plastic flamingoes, the invading Northern yuppies go to court. All of old’s Oak Hills rally around Woodrow, Nadean and Ellis. And the suburbanites go crazy. Mary Stewart, the tiresome housewife who has started all this fuss, is awkwardly painted by the author, but is still the most interesting character here. Mary used to hitchhike in the old days. She--even now--could get a good job as a journalist. But her husband, Jeffery, is locked in uptight-caveman-mania, and Mary finds herself pregnant as part of the larger plan to disseminate power lawn mowers, microwave ovens, liberal psychobabble and lots of unattractive little tykes who look just like Jeffery across the entire American landscape.

This novel seems far-fetched, but it’s not, unfortunately. Developers and their opponents battle everywhere across this land. Where I live, the man who wants to turn Chapparal into golf links calls his rich Capitalist opponents “Communists.” We go on, all of us, fighting this war, where the sides change names, and the permutations are endless. The cannon fodder on each side, unfortunately, are innocent bystanders; the gopher snake, the morning dove, the house cat, the cannery, and the world gets lousier by the minute. Read “Woodrow’s Trumpet” for more bad news--from the home front.