FICTION

A VISIT TO YAZOO by Charles Neider (Penguin: $6.95 paper; 83 pp.) . We’ve seen it in a hundred movies: An innocent Yankee is caught in a speed trap, or has car trouble, in a little Southern town where the big-bellied cops hide the glint of meanness in their eyes behind mirror sunglasses, and where the stench of old, inbred injustice is as oppressive as the heat. In this novella, Charles Neider (“The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones”) stands that formula on its head. His Southerners may be elusive, even sly, but Christopher Burbank, the retired, Florida-bound Yankee banker whose 12-cylinder Emperor breaks down in a village on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, is anything but innocent.

Burbank is “a military man condemned by fate to a civilian life,” used to dealing with the world in a “vigorous, headstrong, confident, almost savage fashion.” His policy is to order people around and, if they don’t knuckle under, sue. Yet Burbank’s authority, like his car, has grown fragile. He is an alcoholic. His best friend is dying. His wife has heart trouble. He is disturbed by dreams in which he does violence to his closest kin.

Clearly--perhaps too clearly--”A Visit to Yazoo” is a fable about the tragic consequences of clinging to power at the expense of all else. Neider tells it with gusto and skill, in prose squirming with detail and, like Burbank’s teeth, “rich with bite.” But the Southerners whose claims to common humanity Burbank rejects are close to being stock rustics, while Burbank himself. . . . The problem isn’t exactly that he can’t be sympathized with; it’s that the people who would sympathize, even identify, with him aren’t the people who will be reading this book.