The Store: Third Chat
Dreadfulpenny: So things really heated up in this week’s installment! (I’ve never watched soap operas, but I’m imagining reading melodramatic novels in bits like this mimics the effect.)
Diablevert: All kinds of stuff happened. Where did you stop?
Dreadfulpenny: Right before chapter 33. The Col. was in and out of jail, he got his cash, Sandusky dropped out of college, Handback is ruined, Jerry almost gets to second base, and we see the end of poor fat Ponny. Toussaint has just started the fireplace in the school and he had the scary run-in with the white sharecropper.
Diablevert: I didn’t read much past that. Although there was one nice scene in the next chapter. Have you been liking it better?
Dreadfulpenny: All the action made me like the book much better… I’m really reading for plot right now.
Diablevert: Cool. But it just grips you in a melodrama way without making you feel like it’s well written?
Dreadfulpenny: No, no, I’m thawing to Stribling’s style like a crusty old coot confronted with an estranged grandchild. I still hate 1930s dialect writing though… I’m never letting that die.
Diablevert: I’m so glad. I’m really warming to him. Dialect aside, though,I think race is his main concern in this book…
Dreadfulpenny: I feel like it’s pride, and hypocrisy… but racism’s big too.
Diablevert: I don’t know, I just find it interesting, in a way I don’t think we’re going to get with, say, Margaret Mitchell – Stribling seems acutely aware of how fucked up all this is, that’s what he’s trying to show you.
Dreadfulpenny: Yeah. The scene where Gracie resigns herself to Toussaint living as a farmworker instead of going to school is heartbreaking.
Diablevert: Word. Or the bit where Sydna leaves Jerry blue-balled on the hammock and there’s the servant girl, waiting, whom he turns to immediately. And then the scene where the poor bastard who saved the Col.’s life has to come begging to him, and Jerry turns him away…that recalled Hamlet a little to me to, in a way…in Jerry’s resentment there is a touch of the very beginning of that play. (Now while the funeral’s baked meats are not yet cold….)
Dreadfulpenny: Wow… that is not a Hamlet reference I would have caught. Kudos. I felt that the scenes you mentioned with Jerry were there to show how he couldn’t escape his Vaiden heritage, how he was more like Milt and less like a bodishattva than he thought of himself. But I do agree how they expose that thoughtless racism that permeated the South.
Diablevert: Thinking this over now, it occurs to me that the whole book can be seen as a parable of the death of reconstruction and the rise of the Jim Crow South — the Col. as the resurgent antebellum old order, willing to cut corners, break rules and laws to get back on top; Handback as the industrialist whose attempt to take possession of the top of the social order during the tumult after Reconstruction has failed, and his attempts at modernization along with it….the post master as the dreamy and disinterested North, bored and distracted and losing his grip…
Dreadfulpenny: Whoa…. that was deep.
Diablevert: Sometimes the old English major in me rises up and spouts off a monologue or two.
Dreadfulpenny: You’re much better at this, than I am, D. Although we should definitely compare Reconstruction in this book to Gone with the Wind, which has one of the craziest, most fucked up descriptions of Reconstruction possible (if I remember correctly).
Diablevert: I’ve never read the actual book, but for sure when we get to it. I dunno, what did you find yourself thinking about in this section? Was there a specific moment where you felt yourself begin to thaw a little toward the book?
Dreadfulpenny: Once the Col. actually stole the money, and then confronted Handback in that misplaced fit of honor, I thought Stribling greatly upped the stakes in the novel. Then I was getting that Lost-esque pleasure in colliding characters when Sandusky showed up with his bogus legalese to negotiate… and actually pulled it off. Then we lost poor fat Ponney, and I’m pretty much in for the duration.
Diablevert: Yeah, this book definitely took a while to get rolling. One think that did strike me – it’s one of the most sexually graphic book since So Big, I think. Characters have lustful thoughts and we get to know what they are!
Dreadfulpenny: Good point (although Scarlet Sister Mary was kinda hot in places). The botched tit-grab was pretty explicit, and utterly painful. TURN YOUR HAND OVER, JERRY! And then they laid there panting in the aftermath… I felt like I was reading a Harlequin paperback.
Diablevert: Word. I always find stuff like that interesting. Awkward. Let me rephrase – I mean, kind of in the sense we touched on way back when we talked about the Age of Innocence – because media from back then never really show this stuff, it’s hard to know what really went on, how innocent the average person really was. So for Mlle. Crowinshield to be so bold,, and for that actually to be depicted, was interesting.
Dreadfulpenny: And, prudish me, I was pretty shocked that the servant girl was just waiting in the wings, and that Jerry actually was capable of any sexual act after all his timidness. I could really live without any hot Colonel action, though, so I hope that isn’t in our future.
Diablevert: I was surprised by her appearance, too, for sure – but that’s what I mean, and maybe I’m reading to much into it, but I feel like the hidden subtext with this stuff is Stribling being all “This is so fucked yup, you guys!”
Dreadfulpenny: I still think Stribling’s most consistent theme is self-deception: Jerry’s lonely faith, Sandusky’s “law practice,” Sydna’s idolatry of the Col., Ponney’s false pregnancies, the Col.’s entire thought process. Do you think that it’s meant to be satirical?
Diablevert: Not satirical, no, that’s not exactly what I mean… I think you’ve hit on something quite important with that self-deception idea. I suppose I would link it to the larger historical context. I think Stribling is saying that the hypocrisy that people display in their personal lives is something that runs right through this whole society; it has to, that’s the only way for this society can continue to function with the imbalances of power that are straining it apart. And without just blankly condeming the characters, I don’t think Stribling thinks this is a good state of affairs….everybody here’s blind in some way.
Dreadfulpenny: OK, I like the book better, lady, but I’m still not ready to give it all that credit yet. Although by the next 100 pages I could be making out with the thing in a back alley, at the rate my opinion is changing.
Diablevert: I dunno, maybe I’m wrong, and at the end the Colonel will have regained everything and the clear moral will be thank god the natural order has been restored, let the choir sing Dixie, amen. But so far i think Stribling is one of our showiest authors, in the show-don’t-tell sense. I really really like that in an author, so maybe I’m giving him too much credit and reading too much in.
Dreadfulpenny: I agree with that (the show-not-tell-i-ness). It’s a little sad that I’m predisposed not to like these more obscure Pulitzers from page one. I will try to turn over a new leaf and approach the next one with a completely open mind.
