The Severed Cortex

Link: http://www.amazon.com/One-Mississippi-Novel-Mark-Childress/dp/0316012114/sr=8-1/qid=1171806824/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-1514635-5264950?ie=UTF8&s=books

by Mark Childress

I know very little about Mark Childress other than he wrote Crazy In Alabama. Apparently that was made into a movie starring Melanie Griffith and Meat Loaf, although it doesn't really ring a bell with me. While I would love to write a book that eventually gets turned into a movie, I think I'd have to say no way if the best I could do is Melanie Griffith. There'd have to be a nude scene. A lot of nude scenes and hopefully not any that included a naked Meat Loaf. Ugh.

One Mississippi is another one of those books that Nancy picked up at the library thinking that I would like it. I do like Southern writers or anything to do with the South, but after reading this book I may have to rethink all that. It's not that the book was bad, because it wasn't. It's just that it wasn't all that spectacular. I have to give the writer credit for keeping me interested; at 400 pages I did read it fairly quickly. At least it was fairly quickly for me given the fact that I'm not a book nut and don't read for a living like Nancy or Holly. For me reading for hours doesn't come easy because I've got the attention span of an 8 year old with a tow sack full of cotton candy. My main gripe is that for a book that took place in the early 1970's Mississippi and contained themes of interracial dating, gay sex, pot smoking with Cher, criminal negligence, vandalism, arson, and a school shooting, it read like an episode of Leave It To Beaver. I know that sounds impossible but it's true. I didn't even know it was possible to write those things on such a candy-ass level. I guess if you are a semi-famous writer who has had his works turned into movies, you feel some need to not alienate your mainstream audience too much. None of these themes go into any depth at all, so much so that the main character doesn't even know that his best friend has homosexual tendencies until the end of the book. Hey, I grew up and lived in a Southern atmosphere so I know that most of these themes are not something anyone would discuss in casual conversation in 1970's Mississippi, but this is a novel and there could have been some exploration into any one of them.

As you guys know, I don't read a whole lot of fiction. I find the real world to be fascinating enough, which is weirdly strange because when I think about the possibility of writing a book or short story, all I think of are fictional accounts. My ideas tend to be much darker than most of the stuff out there though. That's probably why I don't give this book the proverbial two thumbs up. It reads well and there are plenty of passages where any one of us can relate, but if you are going to attack these types of themes you should probably dig for the darker edge if you want to get my approval. I'm sure Mark Childress could care less as he cashes his royalty check.