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Outlaws of the Southern Swamp |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Daphne Athas |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/2001 |
| Size: 2,611 Words, 15,496 Characters |
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NOWHERE ELSE ON EARTH
Josephine Humphreys
New York: Viking, 2000
341 pp., $24.95
Josephine Humphreys writes her new novel, Nowhere Else on Earth, from the point of view of Rhoda Strong, wife of Henry Berry Lowrie of the notorious Lowrie gang in North Carolina during the Civil War and Reconstruction. This historical subject is a departure for Humphreys, a native of Charleston, South Carolina, who is known for fiction of marriage and family life in the contemporary South. She has traditionally focused on the personal, sexual, and racial dynamics of middle-class suburbanites and has been widely praised for her nuanced style and acerbic wit in three previous novels, Dreams of Sleep, Rich in Love, and The Fireman's Fair. "In finding words, joining them into sentences, crafting sentences into paragraphs [Humpheys] shows an often exquisite judgment, a tone of almost perfect pitch and rhythm, a feel for metaphor and image that is always sure and sometimes stunning," writes Michael Malone, a contemporary critic and novelist.
With the breakdown of boundaries between fiction, history, and memoir, it is a dilemma whether to consider this novel as more history than story. Humphreys puts a disclaimer at the beginning: "Although portions of this novel are derived from real events, each character in it is fictional, a composite drawn from history and from imagination. No reference to any living person is intended or should be inferred." Yet the book offers a Lowrie family tree and a record of births and de...
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... Barnes demands he finish it off, but he cannot. So Barnes shoots it dead.
Such anecdotes permeate the book. Their beauty and dignity almost make up for its missing center but not quite. Only rough-edged treatment could have unlocked a phenomenon as enigmatic as the Lowrie gang, and the reader is left wishing that Humphreys' vision had been as daring as her documentation is eloquent. vbcrlf
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
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articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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