If you’ve read Harry Crews’ novel A Feast of Snakes you will be familiar with Duffy Deeter. In that story, he befriends Joe Lon and Willard as they walk around the campground where Deeter’s winnebago is parked. They spot him as he sets up a bench and begins lifting weights. They ask if they can join in and they take turns chugging liters of whiskey between bench presses before embarking on a series of misadventures. Duffy Deeter is there to attend the annual rattlesnake hunt. He leaves his wife behind in Florida and brings a female cocaine sniffing graduate student along for sexual entertainment. That same Duffy Deeter is brought back in All We Need of Hell as the protagonist of the story rather than a supporting character.
In fact, the opening paragraphs in All We Need of Hell are lifted directly, almost word for word, from A Feast of Snakes, the big difference being that the name of the cocaine sniffing coed nymphette has been changed to Marvella. We are immediately transported inside Duffy’s mind as he fantasizes about violence from World War II while having sex with her in his mobile home. This time he isn’t in rural Georgia though, he is right near home in Gainesville, Florida where he works as a lawyer and lives with his wife Tish and their son Felix. Duffy is athletic and obsessed with physical fitness while his son prefers to eat junk food and watch TV. Tish is a woman he just can’t relate to. She can’t relate to him either. He tries to teach them about Zen Buddhism and Taosim by holding meditation sessions in their backyward and then making Felix work out in his private gym. None of this is going well for any of them. Tish is also having an affair with Duffy’s law partner, the chronically irritating Jert McPhester. How could you possibly respect a man with a name like that?
Duffy Deeter knows his life is on the wrong track, but he has no idea how to set things to right. He has a hilarious confrontation with Jert which I won’t describe here. I’ll just ruin it for you if I do, but I will say it involves Duffy crushing Jert’s testicles. Later, in another hilarious scene, Duffy breaks into his own house while Tish and Jert are having sex in his bed. I won’t spoil this one either, but it does involve a paddle and Jert’s ass. An especially clever passage happens afterwards when Tish calls Duffy and begs him to come home because she thinks a burglar had broken into their house. When Duffy arrives, the police are there and Duffy gloats because he knows what really happened and he watches as Tish and Jert, who don’t know the truth, lie to the police. It is one of those times when only the protagonist and the reader know the truth while the others in the room don’t. Harry Crews pulls this literary trick off perfectly; by making the truth a secret that is shared between Duffy and yourself, you get drawn closer to him as a character.
After hitting rock bottom, a new friend appears in Duffy’s life, an African American professional football player named Tump. That name must mean something special to Crews because he also uses it as the name of the football coach in A Feast of Snakes. This is a man who understands how low and confused Duffy is and he goes about helping him solve his problems. Tump’s first approach is to make friends with Duffy’s son Felix. The two of them get along perfectly so Duffy drives them off in his winnebago, they go pick up Marvella, and the four of them go to a football field to run around in the moonlight all night. Tump brings Felix out of his shell and Duffy realizes he doesn’t know how to relate to his son.
There is another clever twist here because Tump embodies what Duffy thinks he believes. Duffy is deeply into Eastern mysticism and spends time meditating and reciting mantras, but he doesn’t understand what any of it means. He uses it to build an armor around himself and he also uses it as a means of controlling his wife and son by trying to teach the philosophy to them. In his mind, he is trying to connect with them, but it all fails. What Duffy fails to understand is that Zen and Taosim are all about letting life happen and not being in control. This is what Tump embodies; he gets through to Felix because he lets their friendship happen rather than forcing it. Tump is so successful at life because he always goes with the flow. As Duffy watches them tossing the football around, he realizes how proud he is of Felix and also sees what he has been doing wrong. There is another poignant moment in this passage when Tump tells Duffy how important mothers are. You can literally see Duffy shrink even though Crews doesn’t specifically write that. Duffy wants to be the head and the leader of his family, but this desire is so overblown that he fails to see the value in his own wife. He shrivels because he knows Tump is right. This humanizes him because he realizes his own weakness and his own mistake at this point. Rather than reacting with the expected bluster, he instead admits to himself that it is time to change.
Since Duffy is having an existential crisis, he begins to look back over his life and think about his relationship with his parents. He visits his widowed, agoraphobic mother who lives in a dark apartment with the curtains permanently draw and fishbowls on the shelves with about half of them being home to dead goldfish floating on the surfaces. She insists on feeding all of them so he wonders about her sanity. More importantly, he revives memories of his father, an air force pilot who lost his sanity after fighting Nazis in World War II. Although his father was loving and quite a lot of fun, Duffy locates the source of all his problems in their relationship.
By the end of the book, Tump has helped Duffy repair his relationships with everybody in his family including Tish. Duffy comes to the realization that he feels a need to be in control because he fears vulnerability. This is rooted in his desire to avoid going insane like his fathe. Both Duffy and Tish admit that they don’t know each other and agree to begin again. They also agree that neither of them are to blame for their failing marriage. Sometimes things don’t work out because that is part of being human. And you know what happens next. You should know from experience that the making out after making up is the sweetest, most delicious love making you can make.
Aside from all the amazing plot twists, narrative tension, and dark humor, this novel succeeds because it does such a great job with character studies. From the start, we are immediately plunged into the strange and terrible mind of Duffy who instantly becomes an unforgettable character. Despite being the kind of person I wouldn’t want to know, he turns out to be admirable for his determination, his passion, and the deviously twisted logic of his complex mind. A writer is great when they can make you see the world from the point of view of someone you wouldn’t ordinarily understand and Harry Crews succeeds brilliantly in this. He is also a great character because he subverts our expectations. Since he is such an alpha male type of guy to the hilt, you would expect him to react to his situation in a less sympathetic way. But instead he is man enough to admit his faults, confront his weaknesses, and attempt to make amends for what he has done wrong. In Duffy Deeter, and in Tump too, Harry Crews has tapped into what it means to be a real man. A large part of that means being responsible as well as tough. There has never been a literary character as unique as Duffy Deeter and there never will be again.
And something has to be said about Tump since he is such a central figure in the plot. He is the deus ex machina that arranges for everything to work out right in the end. Being fun, insightful, big hearted, charismatic, and honest, he is nothing but lovable and in many ways he really steals the show. You feel like you get to know him on an intimate level. He is eternally optimistic, but he isn’t looking at the world through rose colored glasses since all the good he sees in other people is really there. Everybody, that is, except for Jert McPhester. You just can’t admire a guy whose name is Jert McPhester. But I fear that describing Tump in too much detail here would be an injustice. You have to read the book to experience him for yourself.
All We Need Of Hell isn’t as grotesque as Harry Crews’ earlier novels, but it does have its moments where it feels like someone is hammering a nail into your funny bone. It is also the work of a more mature Harry Crews with less shock value and transgression and a lot more humanity. I haven’t read all of his novels, but for now I might gamble and say that this could be his most polished work with all the right elements of character development, plot progression, and its mixture of complexity and accessibility. It is entertaining, but also deep and dark enough to be cathartic. Any writer who can pull off such an optimistic ending that is also believable has a lot going for them. It’s an underrated novel by an underrated writer and I’m surprized it hasn’t been made into a movie. It would be good as the kind of indy, art house American family comedy-dramas that Alexander Payne is known for.
No comments:
Post a Comment