A Summer of Love and Lyrical Llamas

Nothing much extraordinary takes place on the Dearman llama farm in the Mississippi Delta, unless you count the low, bellowing songs the llamas sing at sunrise and sunset.

Nothing much extraordinary, that is, until Harris Dearman, brother to Swami Don, arrives one summer driving his fancy convertible up from the Gulf Coast and banging on an ah-ooga horn that plays “The Times They Are A-Changin,’ ” or so it sounded at the moment to Harris’ 12-year-old nephew, Leroy. But then again, Leroy would hear that song. He is a lighting rod of sensitivity, especially poised for the high-voltage charge Uncle Harris’ visit brings to the family.

Lewis Nordan, who carved a popular niche for himself in his 1993 novel, “Wolf Whistle,” an off-center retelling of the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, is consistently adept at creating a world whose strangeness is leavened by a commensurate amount of love and compassion for its peculiarities. “Lightning Song” is no exception. Coming from a place somewhere between the bittersweet stylings of Carson McCullers and the gothic mannerism of Flannery O’Conner, Nordan has in his fourth novel added an altogether different chapter to his unique song of the South.

Once settled, Uncle Harris wastes no time transforming life on the farm. If it’s not the Playboys and Penthouses stacked by his bed in the attic, a siren song Leroy can’t ignore, then it’s the hour of grog rations on the front porch, blender whipping up stingers, rusty nails and banana daiquiris. Sadness seems to scurry from Harris “like geese before a child’s cane,” and Leroy and his two younger sisters, Laurie and Molly, are thoroughly mesmerized.

But in the Nordan universe, darkness clearly shadows the cartoon aspects of life. Wild dogs attack baby llamas in the fields. New neighbors mourn their murdered son, and not before long, Leroy find Harris and his mama, Elsie, kissing a long, serious kiss in the kitchen while Swami Don’s upstairs taking a shower. Love, Leroy begins to understand, is not just a feeling you have for your parents but something far more frightening for its magnetic pull, its strength to draw nearly complete strangers together.

So when he falls headlong under the spell of Ruby Rae, the town’s baton-twirling instructor and every 12-year-old boy’s “most private dream of heaven,” he comes face to face with the unavoidable attraction of dangerous things. It’s a painful lesson shared among all the residents of the Dearman farm, who square off that summer in triangles of love and rivalry and heartache as if they never knew themselves or each other. Swami Don reminisces about his first sweetheart. Elsie is entranced by the kidnapping of Italian politician Aldo Moro. Laurie proves to be a dead-eye shot with her daddy’s rifle, and Molly stops wetting her pants, if only temporarily.

Falling apart and coming together again, the Dearmans discover, like most families do, how dissimilar, yet still how bound by blood they are. No wonder by the end Leroy and his sisters plead to hear their favorite story: how Mama met Daddy, how he showed her the llamas and how beautiful they were when they ran.

While Nordan’s plotting is at times a little lackadaisical and “Lightning Song” is not a particularly ambitious novel, he doesn’t miss a note in capturing the fuzzy charge that fills the air and sparks between children and adults who speak too little and stand too close, and Leroy, who sees everything, is charming in his naivete and endearing in his innocent, if headlong, desire.

“Deep somewhere in the heart of him,” Nordan writes about his protagonist, “Leroy understood many things for which he had no words just then.” Fortunately Nordan does. The words may describe a world half understood and half mysterious as if seen during a storm at night, but the strobe flashes of lightning tell us enough. Such is Nordan’s take on the passage between childhood and adolescence, a world of wide-eyed wonder, darkness and light, love and sex.