New South

Padgett Powell's vivid grocery list

by Julia Hanna

MRS. HOLLINGSWORTH'S MEN, by Padgett Powell. Houghton Mifflin, 144 pages, $20.

Whatever dire pronouncements can be made regarding the declining state of publishing today -- the homogenizing effects of chain bookstores, the insidious influence of Hollywood, the disappearance of editors who edit -- things can't be that bad. They can't be that bad because Houghton Mifflin has just published Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men, a wonderfully ornery novella by Padgett Powell that rejects the slick categories often used to market goods in the din of today's market.

Powell, though critically acclaimed, has always been a hard sell, and it's easy to imagine the sales reps wringing their hands over this piece of work. His characters are frequently disaffected Southerners portrayed with the same startling lack of sentimentality that marks Barry Hannah's fiction. The result, though bracingly intelligent, won't win him a spot in Oprah's book club. Instead, Powell creates a fitting ally in Mrs. Hollingsworth. For as she composes a fantastic "grocery list" of fevered imaginings, this seemingly ordinary 50-year-old woman is in full retreat from Oprah, Volvos, and her daughters, the "NPR rockettes" who fear mom is losing her mind.

Mrs. Hollingsworth revels in her particular brand of nuttiness, and as readers we cheer her on. Tentatively, she begins the list: "A mule runs across Durham, on fire." From there she spins happily out of control, concocting and discarding various scenarios and gradually giving herself over to a joyful rush of spontaneous creation and escapism from "the muddy real," where one reads in the newspaper, for example, "about the curvature of the president's member. He had a peyroni that did not get fully erect. The president of the United States. This was real. Tell her this was not also then a fog, and a worse one than the one she had learned to take lodgement in."

There are plenty of such references to contemporary culture's oddities, thunderbolts of honesty that annihilate, or at least pin down, politically correct advocates of diversity: "The zombies . . . had been schooled not to denigrate the different. They were attending just now, in fact, a large adult-education academy, studying a curriculum that insisted there was no such thing as difference at all."

But Mrs. Hollingsworth doesn't spend much time on easy targets. Her primary obsession is the grocery list, "a list for her meal for the largest fools starving on earth." We sit at her side, happy and hungry, watching the banquet come together from (she admits) some fairly preposterous ingredients that include a couple of bumbling rednecks named Hod Bundy and Rape Oswald, media giant "Roopit Mogul," a woman of unimaginable, Helen-of-Troy-level beauty, and a tired, lost man swamped by memories of his father's football-playing honor and his own shortcomings in the arena of manhood.

Out of this improbable stew rides Nathan Bedford Forrest, a legendary Confederate war hero, "a man who had somehow never been beaten in a war that was lost from the start." In a plot to locate "the New Southerner," Roopit Mogul sends Hod and Rape out with a machine that generates a hologram of Forrest; the man who recognizes the significance of this mighty icon of the Lost Cause will serve as the chosen one, Mogul claims, the genetic founder of "a line of men in the New South who will perforce raise up the Old by eliminating the genetic dearth effected by the War. . . . "

Don't be scared off by this wackiness. Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men is good, solid fun that bears no relation to the self-satisfied cleverness of some experimental fiction. The novella's metafiction is leavened by Mrs. Hollingsworth's straightforward delight in what she's up to: creation for one's sole amusement. After considering the propriety of making light of a war marked "by the bones of boys," she concludes: "She could do nothing about the casualties of war, past or present . . . except to entertain herself as best she could while she herself became a spindly skeleton preparing to get into her own uneven grave." In the meantime, why not consider the possibility of a 50-foot-tall Confederate general on a skateboard commanding an army of boys to ride against the forces of NPR and the specter of living in "stilled and stilted timid toadspawn conformity?"

In jam-packed phrases like these, Powell's genius for orchestrating the music and the meaning of a sentence leaps at us with all the demonic force of Nathan Bedford Forrest on a rampage. "Sometime he take off his butternut duster look like Peterman catalogue, and his Victoria Secret garter belt and all, and grease hisself up naked as a jaybird and say, Okay, I fight all you, black white blue gray I don't care." It is a sight to behold.