Southern exposure with a smile

Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena

Julia Reed

Random House: 182 pp., $22.95

*

The South may have lost the Civil War, but in the aftermath of its defeat, it somehow managed to convince much of the rest of the nation that its women were the prettiest, its past the most romantic, its writers the most talented and its food the most delicious. For those unlikely to succumb to this kind of snow job, there was always the lure of the gothic South, a literary hotbed of violence, eccentricity, alcoholism, incest and downright lunacy. Eden or hellhole, the South has provided its writers with a stockpile of ready-to-use material.

Southern-ness, one might say, is a marketable commodity or, rather, a commodity for which there always seems to be a market. Journalist Julia Reed, a senior writer at Vogue and a contributing writer at Newsweek, is what might be called a professional Southerner. Born and raised in Greenville, Miss., she’s become known to readers of her articles in such publications as Vogue, Oxford American and the New York Times Magazine as a dependable source of wryly humorous set pieces about various aspects of her native region, from Southern food, Southern fashions and Southern hairdos to the Southern penchant for violence and firearms.

Although she moved up North for her career, Reed remains loyal to the South, dividing her time between New York and New Orleans. She certainly must love New Orleans a whole lot to endure the kind of tribulations she recounts with a kind of masochistic glee in “A Plague on Our Houses.” The city’s latest plague has been an infestation of Formosan termites, a breed apart, which make ordinary termites seem like adorable house pets:

“They eat through anything: insulated electrical wires, creosote-coated utility poles, brick mortar, caskets. They ate the clock at the top of the 185-foot wooden belltower at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, so now there’s a plastic one. No structure is immune -- but they are.... In the late 1980s, a Louisiana State University entomologist thought he’d finally figured out a way to get rid of them, but then he fell victim to another New Orleans plague -- street crime. He was murdered for his wristwatch on his way home from celebrating an agreement with city officials that would have enabled him to test his treatment.”

We’ve often been told that the South is a violent place. “Our reputation for violence and criminal disorder remains firmly rooted in fact,” Reed confirms in her essay “Trigger Happiness.” Is it backwardness? A carry-over from the frontier mentality? A legacy of that same code of personal “honor” that gave us dueling? Or maybe something to do with living in a hot, humid climate? To Reed, the answer is obvious: “We shoot more people because we have the most guns.... I don’t think I know anybody in the South who doesn’t carry, or at least own, a gun,” she informs us, before going on to give instances where having a gun handy turned an otherwise simple mistake, minor misunderstanding or transitory temper tantrum into something with fatal consequences. With this in mind, Reed has wisely chosen to deviate from the regional custom by not having a gun herself -- much to the consternation of her father.

Southerners may not be the only people with a penchant for shooting their spouses, but Reed believes that when the perpetrator is a Southern female, she is more likely to get away with it -- or, at least, to be able to get away with pleading temporary insanity.

The cases Reed cites in her “Lady Killers” essay amply demonstrate what she identifies as the Southern capacity for ignoring any inconvenient realities that might disrupt the collective ideal of pure and innocent (white) Southern womanhood. On a related matter, Reed’s essay “Mysterious Ways” examines what she sees as the Southern habits of not taking responsibility for one’s actions and not inquiring too closely into the causes of things.

On the lighter side, Reed looks at Southern tastes in fashion, hairdos, makeup and cookery. Comparing Southern women with their sisters in New York and the Midwest, she has a good eye for what is distinctive about each region’s notions of attractiveness. When she gets onto that all-too-well-worn topic of Southern cookery, however (and she gets onto it quite a lot), well, let’s just say if you don’t share the Southern taste for heavy, greasy food, rich in starch, fat, salt, sugar and artificial food coloring, accompanied by an infinite variety of jello molds, you may not be all that interested in reading page after page celebrating such culinary delights.

Bringing together 20 previously published articles with 10 pieces appearing in print for the first time, this book should please Reed’s fans. The general reader may be less beguiled. Even bearing in mind that a certain amount of repetitiveness is to be expected in a collection of this kind, anyone trying to read this book is likely to develop a bad case of deja lu. Sentences, even whole paragraphs from one essay, reappear in another in only slightly altered form: the same topics, the same observations, even the same jokes. But taken in smaller doses, Reed’s ruminations on the manners and mores of her native heath are amusing enough to raise a smile, insightful enough to raise more than an eyebrow.