A sweet 'n' sour southern boy

Author: By Michael Pearson

Date: SUNDAY, June 14, 1998

Page: C3

Section: Books

Blount is a Georgia boy who lives in New York City, a man caught between cultures and able to see the absurdities all around him, North and South, past and present. But ``Be Sweet'' is not a typical story of growing up in the South any more than ``Finnegans Wake'' is an Irish folktale. Blount is more monologuist than memoirist. His prose is closer to Spalding Gray's than to Frank McCourt's. His story floats along in a sort of viscid stream of consciousness, dammed up every few pages by a non sequitur or two.

The central story line is Blount's memories of his mother and father, mainly his mother. But along the way, he mentions a few wives and describes in some detail his relationships with his son and daughter and grandchildren. The story is often dizzyingly disjointed, the only path being digression. So, although he ostensibly seeks to confront and slay the ``family curse,'' he is a knight errant in every sense of the term, both on a quest and seemingly merrily lost at the same time.

We are used to memoirs that reveal the brutalities and scars of growing up, in plots streamlined for the silver screen, but it would be hard to translate this tale of woe (and there is woe here) unless the filmmaker were willing to stop occasionally -- for a baseball anecdote or the occasional limerick, to listen to Maury Wills intone about Jackie Robinson, to overhear a joke about multiple orgasms, or to pause for a Whitmanesque tour de force on the history of ``juniors'' or even for a more straightforward, but fascinating, tour of Beijing. As digressions go, it is probably no coincidence that the longest chapter in the book is titled ``Juniors.'' After all, Oedipus has to deal with the father before he fixates on the mother.

If anything, though, this is a twisted Oedipal tale (try to untie that Gordian knot) in which Blount reminds the reader, a few too many times, perhaps, that his first act in life was to nearly kill his mother. She spent a good portion of his youth, it seems, reminding him of her sacrifice, reminding him to ``be sweet.'' It turned him into a comic writer, and that means a writer who had a hard time being sweet, the kind of man who writes a memoir in which he finds himself near the end of his story saying this: ``Is that what women want? Platitudes with feeling? Genuinely inspirational-sounding greeting-card verse? That goes against my instincts. Which are to follow language as deep as it will go, as long as I can keep up with it. And which I learned at my mother's knee. Excuse me. I got carried away. I was saying I have been working toward making the following simple statement: I hated my mom.''

Of course, Blount hates his mother the way Quentin Compson hates the South -- that is, he hates her out of deep love. His is an ambivalent brand of hate, but, then again, this is a conditional love story, about a love that is human and therefore all mixed up with mistake and regret.

Eventually, Blount reveals the family curse (and it's a doozy, one that would qualify for an Ibsen play, if it hadn't already been used in an Ibsen play), but despite its horror, what the reader realizes is that somehow such curses have led to the creation of the likes of Mark Twain, P. G. Wodehouse, and Roy Blount Jr., that all comedy is set in motion by some sort of pain. Without that curse we might not have gotten the kind of digression that leads Blount to think of the literary canon: ``I believe that, yes, there should be a canon -- a body of required reading that must appear on syllabi so that college students, having read or at least purchased these texts, can feel fully and truly justified in confining their cultural pursuits henceforward to watching cheesy television -- but that there should be a canon only if I am in it. Now. While I can enjoy it. Not so much for the honor as for the long-term book sales. Since Dante never pops up on the best-seller lists, I assume that `The Divine Comedy' never moves as briskly in a given week as `All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten' did for so long. But surely canonization . . . would amount to a steady annuity. Like, if you're in formal-wear rental and someone is buried in one of your tuxes.''

I'm not exactly certain where Roy Blount Jr. fits in the literary canon, but I am sure of one thing: If there's a heaven for digressors and limerick writers, he'll be there, loving it, conditionally.