FICTION

MUSIC OF THE SWAMP by Lewis Nordan (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: $16.95; 191 pp.) . Lordy, Lordy, can Lewis Nordan write! Horrible things happen, and horribly funny things, too, in the Delta town of Arrow Catcher, Miss., where Sugar Mecklin lives with his alcoholic father and his long-suffering mother and his white-trash neighbors. Over it all is the music, which alone makes life bearable: gospel hymns, opera, Bessie Smith, Elvis--the music of Sugar’s own youth; and when youth gives out, as it has for Sugar’s father, the music of booze; and when booze gives out, as it eventually does for them both, the music of nostalgia. All delivered to us on the riffs of Nordan’s prose.

Arrow Catcher is a place where atrocious crimes, like child- beating, are committed by innocents; where contempt is a back-alleyway to pity, then to friendship; where kindness is tongue-tied and love rarely dares speak its own name. In short, it’s like any other place, with one difference: Nordan makes us feel, in reading about it, the delight and the absolute security we felt as children discovering how stories can be true and better than true at the same time.

In Arrow Catcher, tornadoes rip roofs off houses and sprinkle them with live fish. Mice chirp in mattresses and rats swim in flooded cellars. Sugar discovers (he thinks) a dead woman in a glass coffin under his house. His father’s Pinto explodes. His mother’s gravy is so toxic that blue smoke rises from it. All this, however, is percussion. The melody in this novel is Sugar’s hopeless love for his father and his father’s hopeless love for him and his parents’ hopeless love for one another: a song that can’t be anything but the blues.