‘Blues’ with a postmodern playfulness

EVERY reviewer must have a couple of them -- authors he’s never done justice to, for no good reason. George Garrett is one of mine. I have failed him twice -- in reviewing his 1994 story collection, “The Old Army Game,” which included his superb 1961 novella of the post-Korean War military, “Which Ones Are the Enemy?,” and his 1998 novel, “The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You,” a tragicomedy centered on the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Partly, I think, it is a generational thing. World War II and Korea were Garrett’s wars; Vietnam was mine. Garrett had a love for the Army -- coexisting with, and even reinforcing, a profound and cynical knowledge of its faults -- that I couldn’t share. Partly it is regional. Garrett is a Southerner -- he teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia -- who hasn’t always been as politically correct as I would have liked on matters of race and gender, and it didn’t seem to make any difference that most of the time I knew perfectly well that Garrett, a canny and mischievous writer, was jerking my chain.

No, I have no excuses, and I hereby apologize.

Garrett’s latest collection, “Empty Bed Blues,” offers me a chance at redemption. I’m happy to say that its 15 stories include several very good ones and that all are interesting. Most have autobiographical elements. They combine postmodern playfulness with the old Southern front-porch storytelling tradition that nourished William Faulkner. They branch and meander like tidewater channels; they take their time; they digress seemingly at random but always with the aim of bringing fresh (OK, sometimes eccentric, even off-the-wall) insight to the material.

Take “A Story Goes With It,” based on the true tale of how eight Nazi saboteurs landed on the East Coast of the United States in 1942, only to be quickly rounded up. It’s also a survey of historians’ accounts of the subject and an acid commentary on the ways of officialdom (the FBI claimed credit, but in truth the saboteurs were, as Garrett called them, “stumblebums,” and one, seeking mercy, walked right into J. Edgar Hoover’s office and spilled the beans). Mostly, though, it’s a tribute to Garrett’s late writer friend Eddie Weems, who told him an unauthorized version of the saboteur tale that may not be verifiably true, but who cares? Garrett describes drinking and going to strip clubs with Weems and bookends the story with screenplay-style scenes in which Hitler proposes the plan to his spy chief, Adm. Wilhelm Canaris. It’s a hoot.

As an old soldier, Garrett is interested in courage -- the real, not the Hollywood, variety. Two of his stories on the subject are wry. The heroes are an 85-year-old “day marshal” hired by a cash-strapped Southern town during the Depression and a goof-off named Floogie who single-handedly defends a hill in Korea against onrushing Chinese hordes because he slept through the order to pull out. A third story, “Tanks,” which plays off William Styron’s novella “The Long March,” is more substantial. The narrator is a hard-bitten sergeant, not Styron’s “candy-ass” Reserve lieutenants, but the conclusion, in its agony and pity, is similar.

“A Short History of the Civil War” consists entirely of excerpts from letters written by Garrett’s ancestors, who fought for both North and South. “Ghost Me What’s Holy Now” evokes the Elizabethan England that Garrett described in his 1991 novel, “Entered From the Sun: The Murder of Marlowe.” Over wine, Robert Carey, Earl of Monmouth, confides to his young clerk thoughts that, if made public, could get him hung; later, alone in bed, the old nobleman is haunted by the face of a Scottish rebel he sent to the gallows. It’s a splendid story that captures both the flavor of the period and a sense of what’s timeless in human affairs.

Does this mean that I’ve gone soft on Garrett -- that I no longer see, or pretend to ignore, what used to irritate me about his work? No, because it’s still there.

“Pornographers” is a corrosively amusing story about the sex industry and the only slightly less sleazy trade of a “true crime” writer who reports on the exploitation of a 12-year-old girl. The writer/narrator can’t resist a dig at “feminoids,” and a sheriff laments that the Old South -- that is, the Jim Crow South -- was better than the New, infected by “twisted fury and madness” spawned in “Yankee cities.” We’re reminded that Garrett believes, as Wallace Stegner did, that America went haywire in the 1960s and never recovered.

And how about “Gator Bait,” another act of homage, this time to the movie version of “To Kill a Mockingbird”? The narrator recalls himself as a Depression-era kid watching his lawyer father, like Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch, defend a black man accused of rape. Here, though, the man is probably guilty -- and mentally retarded. Leading black citizens cynically offer the lawyer a hefty fee to lose the case and let the man be executed, arguing that winning it would set back their race. The outraged lawyer throws them out. His decency, not the evil of racism, is what the story is about -- yet Garrett’s portrait of the father is so fiercely loving that “Gator Bait” moves us nonetheless. “How deeply,” the son concludes, “I cherish the example of his pride and hope.”

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Michael Harris is the author of the novel “The Chieu Hoi Saloon.”