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BOTTOMS, THE
by Joe R. Lansdale
Mysterious Press, September 2001
328 pages
$13.95
ISBN: 0892967048


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Mysterious Press took a huge risk sending me this Joe R. Lansdale book to review. Because to me there is no greater American novel than one that begins "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." This is the first line of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, a book I think unmatched in modern literature. While it has flaws - it tells the story of southern racism from the perspective of a white person - the perspective is truly that of a child, a girl trying to understand the huge issues of race and hate and caring and equality. And Scout's authentic voice (in the form of Kim Stanley, the film's narrator) still lives my head, some 35-plus years after the release of the brilliant film adaptation.

The Bottoms is a retelling of To Kill A Mockingbird and when I realized this, I was very skeptical. However, I began reading the book up late last night and read it into early morning, never putting it down. It is Lansdale's own take on major issues: coming of age, racism, what you learn from your parents, power and powerlessness. And it works, even if it isn't told by Scout Finch.

The story is narrated by Harry Crane, a boy growing up in east Texas in the Depression. He has a younger sister, Tom (for Thomasina), and his father, Jacob, is the constable of the town, making a living cutting hair, farming, and taking the small salary that his law-enforcement job brings him. If you're familiar with Lee's novel, Jacob is the Atticus Finch character; he and his wife are raising their children to respect all kinds of people, even tolerating drunks and bigots as much as they can. As Harry points out, seventy years after the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves, there are people living in Texas who don't quite act as if anything has changed. From the mean, lowdown Ethan Nation and his two rotten sons, who believe their white skin makes them superior, to the attitudes of Doc Stephenson, who just assumes that everyone shares his views that blacks and whites are naturally different, the Crane family lives among intolerance and differences being assumed as a matter of course. The Klan exists in East Texas and is active.

This novel is dark; the setting, low-lying wet areas of east Texas (massively different from the Dust Bowl lands of West Texas and Oklahoma) hide many secrets. There are murders, lynchings and language that makes you wince in this book. There are mythical characters like "The Traveling Man" who sold his soul to the devil and "Goat Man", whom Tom and Harry swear they have seen hiding, and whom they believe responsible for some really ugly killings. But you can sense, as you do in reading Mockingbird that it's too simple to blame "Goat Man" just as you can't assume that the spooky Boo Radley is responsible for all of Maycomb's ills and evils.

Lansdale tends to be a little darker than I normally like in a writer, but he wrote an enchanting tale in The Bottoms and I unhesitatingly recommend it. There are gruesome bits to deal with, but as a reward, you encounter the story-teller and keeper of many secrets, Miss Maggie and Doc Tinn, the smart, curious, intuitive "colored" doctor, who has a copy of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis his extensive book collection, which is larger than that of most white folks in town.

It won't replace a masterpiece, but The Bottoms deserves to be judged on its own merits. Do read it. However, it was too evocative for me to ever shake the resemblance, and because of that, I never found it to be the blockbuster that others did.

Reviewed by Andi Shechter, September 2000

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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