Harry Crews. A Feast of Snakes

Part of me hates this book. Hates the characters, their slithery morality and unfulfilled aspirations, hates how the emptiness, the vacuum left is filled with the coiled hissing forms of snakes and how it gets under the skin and into the stomach and bowels. I acknowledge the power and intensity Harry Crews has at his command, but I do not admire his A Feast of Snakes.

Each year in Mystic, Georgia, Jon Lon organizes the Rattlesnake Roundup, a festival that attracts a denizen of unsavory gypsies, thrill-seekers, and drunkards. They arrive in campers and Winnebagos, setup wares, fight dogs, partake in a beauty pageant, and set fire to a thirty-foot-tall snake. So yes, it’s a hillbilly version of the wicker man.

‘Hillbilly’ is an appropriate term, since the Jon Lon’s plight plays out as hillbilly angst. That’s because Jon Lon cannot find love. Not in his wife, his inamorata, his children, his friends, his family, his job, or his position as organizer of the Roundup. No, Jon Lon only laments for the past and his former glories of high school football star and his old girlfriend. One wonders how Jon Lon expects to find “true love” if his definition involves atm, which Crews graphically describes in one of many vile, foul, and cruel sex scenes. So Jon Lon is stuck operating the liquor store once owned by his father and spends most of the day drinking and bitching at his wife. His father isn’t much different except that he bitches at his daughter since his wife killed herself years ago.

The whole book is foul and cruel. Foul because Crews revels in shock. Cruel because Crews casts a hateful eye on all his citizens and puts them through the wringer. Even Lottie Mae, the sole redeeming subplot in the entire novel, is brutalized, driven insane, and disturbed by snakes before she is able to exact an even crueler revenge.

Lottie Mae, a young black girl, is the object of the sheriff’s desire. The sheriff Buddy is a mangled man, a landlocked hillbilly pirate, I guess, with his peg leg. His real leg he lost in ‘Nam. Buddy, too, laments the past for he, too, was once a football star. Most of the male characters were. Now he occupies his time by carrying snakes, one in a sack and the other in his pants. Yes, that is a metaphor Crews pounds in your head, over and over. The phallic nature of snakes. The sexual connotation of Eve’s temptation, of the snake in the garden. And on and on.

I’m exaggerating somewhat, since the snake metaphor is one of the few things Crews deftly handles, despite the overkill. His similes and his prose, however, are dull, at least in the first half. Let me quote a little gem here describing Jon Lon’s wife: “Two inches below her navel her belly just leaped out in this absolutely unbelievable way.” Well, that’s absolutely unbelievable! But it gets better: “she looked like she was carrying a basketball under her dress.” A basketball, no kidding!

The dialogue, mostly in dialect, is authentic, though I questioned some of the intentional misspellings. And the prose does get better in the second half, lyrical at times, but he still stumbles over similes. With obvious imaginative powers, why does Crews stumble with similes?

Rereading what I wrote, I’m shocked I haven’t mentioned the violence. The book’s back cover notes that Crews covers the vices of “adultery, castration, suicide, and murder.” This list, of course, leaves out bullying, rape, drunkenness, drunken driving, fights, lies, animal brutality including mutilation and dog fighting, racism, sexism, abandonment, kidnapping, battered wives, neglected wives, paraphilia, madness, delusions, feces fascination, religion bashing, and idleness. All of which are ingredients for an instant cult classic!

But yes, there is a lot of violence, a lot of touting of masculinity and then more violence. One could posit that Crews argues against masculinity and its corrupting power, which is true. But Crews idealizes athleticism in a well-rendered scene of weight-lifting and dick-measuring, which in the south is how one determines the pecking order. The equivalent of dogs sniffing the other’s rectum.

Despite the Southern Gothic nature, it’s rather insulting for readers to cite Crews alongside the masters Faulkner and O’Connor. Both incorporated humanity in their works, dealt with underlying problems in the south, and both, in the end, were redemptive, even if at times it was a freak show. Crews, however, is just a freak show. With the exception of Lottie Mae, who’s in so little of the book and so distant from the main thread, A Feast of Snakes has little value, which disappoints me since Crews does have intensity as a writer.