Order A FEAST OF SNAKES here
He had always loved her because she was crazy, didn't seem to give a damn about anything. Tonight he hated her for precisely those reasons.
I believe I would have been a good southern man. I love spicy food, soulful music, year-long warmth and have an unexplainable fondness for alligator wrestling. Of course, I would've probably struggled with the remains of racial segregation and giant spiders, but nothing's perfect. If I had been a southern man, maybe I would've understood Harry Crews' A FEAST OF SNAKES a little better. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but its nature felt mysterious to me. Hidden under this rather straightforward story, there is a heart beating. But not exactly the heart of a people, more like the telltale heart under the floorboards in the Poe story. My point is that A FEAST OF SNAKES is creepy. Is that a good thing? I believe so, because it's aleso incredibly earnest and well-written.
Protagonist Joe Lon Mackay is an all-american failure. Part of the blame is his, for making bad choices, being lazy and disinterested in his own future, but part of the blame is also on the people of Mystic County, Georgia who let him through high school without teaching him how to even read, sabotaging his chances for a football scholarship in college. There is something incestuous about the relationship between Joe Lon and Mystic. In his one of theirs, he is THEIR pride and they managed to keep him home, with a wife he cannot coexist with and babies he cannot look in the eye.So Joe Lon is never home. He's always in town, poking the devil and during the annual Rattlesnake Roundup, he chases his youth, looking for a miracle to happen and pull him out of his miserable existence.
I was remember of Brett Easton Ellis' books when reading A FEAST OF SNAKES. Precisely LESS THAN ZERO and AMERICAN PSYCHO, where the characters wander and create chaos around them in search for a meaning to their existence. It could be that simple, really. The weight of adulthood is crushing Joe Lon Mackey's spirit and his attempts to recapture his youth, the wild and carefree feeling of being with the love of his life Berenice, end up only wreaking havoc in town. As I'm growing older, I am realizing that successfully transitioning to adult life is to adapt to changes and learn to appreciate the past without leaning on it, and through Jon Lon Mackey's powerful and destructive melancholia, Harry Crews seems to echo that feeling in A FEAST OF SNAKES.
What did he, Jon Lon, do? What did he have? He had once football to fill up his mind and his body and his days and so he had never thought about it. Then one day football was gone and it took everything with it. He kept thinking something else would surely take its place but nothing ever did. He stumbled from one thing to the next thing. From wife to babies to making a place for crazy campers bent to catching snakes. But nothing gave him anything back. So here he was lying under a dead weight doing what he'd done five years ago, when he was a boy. If it had meant anything then, he had forgotten what; and merciful God, it meant nothing now. His life had become a not very interesting movie that he seemed condemned to see over and over again.
But what about these damned snakes? These soulless, hive-minded creatures that the people of Mystic County keep in barrels by dozens. On the covers of the first editions of A FEAST OF SNAKES, there is a snake eating his own tail. There is one on my edition too, on the bottom left (as you can see above). I may be completely wrong about this, but I feel it has a very important symbolism in the novel. During the Rattlesnake Roundup, Joe Lon Mackey is chasing himself and the only thing it achieves is to consume his own life, slowly and painfully. Whenever snakes are involved in the storyline, things get reaaaallly abstract. It's clear that they're supposed to be a totem animal for Joe Lon, but the significance of what he does with them often eluded me. My favorite snake scene was the wild, sexually-charged memory of Berenice inviting him to lay down in a snake pit with her. It was surreal, beautiful and dangerous.
Harry Crews and I are going to get along. I still have a wealth of material to read from him and his tough and earnest style are extremely appealing to me. Not sure why he is still an exotic import in Canada, while writers of similar strength and interest like Cormac McCarthy are revered. A FEAST OF SNAKES is creepy, yes, but it's also a very sad novel with a protagonist it's hard to feel very concerned about. The life of Joe Lon Mackey has turned into a series of fascinating, gruesome spectacles, sure, yet he is still devoured by the same sadness we're all devoured by when we think about our young, carefree years. Harry Crews writes tough books for tough people and I was pleased to realize there may be a little toughness in me as I very much enjoyed A FEAST OF SNAKES.