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Pearson is best known for his trilogy of
novels set in Neely, North Carolina (A Short History of a
Small Place, Off For the Sweet Hereafter and The
Last of How It Was). He has been justifiably compared to
Faulkner for his penchant for richly detailed, mythical Southern
settings and characters who appear again and again across a series
of novels as well as for his considerable talents with pitch-perfect
narrators. His last novel, Blue Ridge, stepped away from
the oral-tradition-driven narrator, but Polar shows him
back in his established mode, and when it comes to sheer entertainment,
the narrative voice here is as good as anything he's done before.
The main plot--or what would pass for one
if Pearson hadn't inverted the novel's background and foreground--deals
with a little girl who has wandered off into the woods around
her Virginia Blue Ridge farm and never come back. Deputy Ray
Tatum (who appeared in Pearson's Blue Ridge as well) is
the small town's best cop, but while he's diligent and even obsessed
about the girl's disappearance, he can make no progress on the
case. Then a local eccentric (one among many; the town's full
of them) suddenly stops talking compulsively about his favorite
porn movie plots and starts spouting prophetic but cryptic phrases
that may be clues to her disappearance. (The locals are divided
over how, exactly, the sudden change to prophecy took place.
"There's a school of thought," Pearson writes, "that
Clayton fell prey to the [grocery store's] bar-code scanner,
that the laser somehow bored clean through his pupils to his
brain and fused together a couple of pertinent vessels.")
A Gothic-tinged mystery plot that offers
a dollop of David Lynch-style oddities is certainly an engaging
concept. It's the comical set of secondary characters and the
writing voice that dominate much of Polar, though, both
in terms of sheer word count and the overall tone of the book.
Pearson's narrator (an unnamed local with a hilarious regional
voice) gets many of the book's biggest laughs poking fun at the
locals, as he does here in this passage about one of the town's
farmers:
He took poor care of his cattle and worse
care of what paltry income he had. His TV and couch were both
rented at an 18 percent return. That Akers had purchased through
the mail shares in a gold mine in Bermuda and had bought from
a fellow traveling door to door a hot tub that collapsed his
porch. He routinely upgraded his John Deere even with no land
much to work, traded in his truck every eighteen months and took
a thrashing for it, and it was that Akers who'd gone to the super
flea at the fairgrounds in Culpeper and come home with Stonewall
Jackson's wristwatch and a sliver of Moon rock.
So that Akers was widely known about to
be a bit of a fool which he compounded by way of galloping paranoia.
Along with his bilious pitch of contempt for the Department of
Agriculture, he reserved a little venom for the World Bank and
the Trilateral Commission which, to hear it from Akers, kept
a dossier on him and fed information to the Japanese.
That Akers's cattle could never just be
sick, were always poisoned and contaminated, and once Doyle the
veterinarian had discovered the offending parasite, had identified
the fungus or put a name to the bacteria, he'd evermore get invited
to throw in with speculation as to how exactly the Department
of Agriculture had tainted that Akers's forage or managed to
infect his water table....
Now there was a time when Doyle would dispute
with that Akers over the source of his livestock's complaints,
would explain how his cows might have picked up a bug from that
Akers's moldy hay or the swampy ditch behind his house that Akers
employed for a leach field. It had come at length, however, to
be Doyle's practice to shout out "Sons of bitches!"
whenever he dosed, injected or otherwise mended one of that Akers's
cows.
As funny as the narrator's rants about
the local eccentrics are, though, Pearson's deadliest targets
are located not in the Virginia hills but in the inanities that
reach the town through TV, movies and talk radio. We live, Pearson's
narrator tells us, in the "golden age of crap"--or
as he puts it more politely, "it was plain that there was
a national appetite about for tragedy, most particularly some
sort of mishap that was telling of detail and artistic in its
TV presentation." Perhaps inevitably, the mother of the
missing girl finds her daughter's disappearance resonates beautifully
for a hungry, media-fed public. Soon, she leverages her personal
tragedy into a busy career as a populist pundit. "Like most
everybody else on talk radio and palaver TV at the time, that
Dunn woman wasn't called upon to marshal any facts or supply
specific answers to pointed and considered queries but was expected
to unfreight herself, when she got called on for that purpose,
of a lively uninformed and nonresponsive diatribe which suited
her well because she always knew just what she thought but not
necessarily why she'd come to think it." Not surprisingly,
the missing girl's mother is from the city (Dayton, Ohio), and
while the locals may take in their fair share of media garbage,
it's the cultural snob, transplanted into the mountains, who
comes to represent contemporary society at its worst.
Polar's
juxtaposition of broad, often hilarious comedy and grimly, even
eerily drawn tragedy is jarring, to say the least, and it may
take more than a few pages for some readers to settle into the
pattern comfortably. Readers looking for a straightforward mystery
novel whose central plot line readily asserts its dominance over
the text should look elsewhere for their thrills--or consider
loosening their normal drive for plot and let themselves float
down Pearson's meandering text. (And consider the verbal authenticity:
don't spoken narratives tend to have that wandering, mixed-tone
quality, especially if the speaker is loquacious?)
In the final pages, Polar takes
an unexpectedly sad, poetic turn that works beautifully, not
only because Pearson has a talent for mournful lyricism but also
because his sympathy for his characters is so clearly genuine.
It's hard to think of another writer who comes close to the strangely
melancholy, bittersweet qualities Pearson achieves in his best
work, and in these final pages, the subtle turn of emotions is
strikingly original and effective.
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