Darkansas, by Jarret Middleton
A pair of vignettes...
When I was in college, I possessed an arsenal of jokes (loosely construed) that required an inordinately long time to tell. Involved as they were, one could pad them with extraneous detail, invest them with as much dramatic flair as one’s abilities would permit. Yet their punchlines were nauseatingly disappointing. And that was their entire point—such “humor” is, in effect, a prank, a sadistic ruse designed to draw people in, using gobs of their time, only to let them down hard. They were less humor than they were cruelty. I haven’t told such jokes in years—I’d like to think I’m a kinder person now.
Decades later, my wife and I caught the Reverend Horton Heat at the now-defunct Double Door in Chicago. To our surprise (and that, I’m sure, of the other psychobilly fanatics who packed the room), the Rev’s back-up band was a four-piece bluegrass outfit called Split-Lip Rayfield. My beloved and I love bluegrass, so we were not disappointed. But this was dark bluegrass. And, indeed, we were ecstatically head-bopping to a particularly rip-snorting number when it slowly sank through that the lyrics concerned the trials and travails of a killer of women. My darling told me on the way home that, in realizing the tune’s message, she’d felt betrayed—the musicianship pulled her in, suborning her participation in a moment rife with misogyny.
What do these tales have in common? And for that matter, what do they have to do with Jarrett Middleton’s Southern Gothic, Darkansas? They both involve a building of trust, whether through artistic excellence or simple artifice. But that trust is ill-deserved. The listener acquiesces only to be smacked down.
Thus it is for readers of Middleton’s ninety-percent compelling book, although in this case the dispiriting dénouement is neither unthinkingly malign nor intentional. It is an artifact, instead, of a storyline that—one realizes too late—proves ill-conceived from the start. Darkansas is the tale of the Bayne clan and its successive generations of twin sons. Whether through rage, recklessness, negligence, religious mania, or simple happenstance, one son in each generation manages to cause the death of his father. Clearly, the past harbors some shameful secret—clearly, something supernatural is afoot.
Middleton’s characters are sympathetic and vivid—Jordan Bayne, obscure country picker; Malcolm, his more conventional, insurance executive brother; and Walker, their bluegrass superstar father, people the frame of this story, appearing throughout and bookending those cycles of Bayne fathers and patricidal sons who came before them. Malcolm’s getting married, a wedding shindig’s in the offing, and the Baynes have returned to their ancestral Arkansas home. Old friendships are renewed, relationships are rekindled, and rapprochement—however imperfect—hovers within reach.
Yet there’s the matter of that curse...
Middleton’s writing is punchy and spare, recalling the prose of Southern contemporaries and near-contemporaries like Larry Brown, Darcey Steinke, and Harry Crews. And the story moves along nicely even as one begins to fret that any satisfying rationale for its events might be slipping out of reach.
That worry proves justified. The origin of the Baynes’ once-a-generation misfortunes and the curse—or in Middleton’s usage, the myth—that drives them, when finally revealed, feels oddly disconnected from the rest of the novel, though hints of it are threaded throughout. It’s as if Middleton started with an arbitrary, if mildly interesting, premise and endeavored to expand on it, producing a novel that ultimately doesn’t cohere. Still, Middleton’s chops as a writer are evident throughout this maiden effort—enough so to warrant optimism regarding his future outings.
If you do decide to give Darkansas a chance—hey, maybe the goods are there and I just missed them—buy it at your independent bookshop or bookshop.org, an online retailer that devotes part of its profit to supporting local booksellers.
