Ophiophobic readers beware. Harry Crews’ A Feast of Snakes is not for you, or at least not if you plan on sleeping anytime soon. Herpetologists probably won’t get much out of this either because there is nothing scientific going on in this novel. If you love snakes, this one probably isn’t for you either since most snakes in the book come to a bitter end. But if you’re into grit lit, transgressive fiction, or Southern Gothic, this short and dark novel might have something going for it. This book is permeated with rattlesnakes who slide into every plot line, every characters, and even into people’s stomachs in a scene where the slithery critters get deep fried and eaten for dinner.
As the novel begins, the remote town of Mystic, Georgia is gearing up for their annual rattlesnake hunt, a night of festivities at the high school followed by a day when the snakes are forced out of their underground hiding places and captured. It is an event that draws people from all over the region.
Joe Lon is the central character. He once was the star of the high school football team, but his life went nowhere after that. His girlfriend Berenice goes off to college while Joe Lon stays behind with a wife and two kids he doesn’t want. He beats her and verbally abuses her, leaving her with the kids while he runs around with his best friend, the thoroughly unlikable Willard who has replaced him as the star of the football team. The two of them drink gallons of whiskey and have a series of misadventures that later include Deeter Duffy, a lawyer from Florida who has nothing but bad intentions. Joe Lon also works in a shack that sells liquor. The night before the festival, Joe Lon visits his father who is training a pit bull for a dog fight on the eve of the rattlesnake hunt. Joe Lon’s sister lives with the father, but she is insane, refusing to leave her room and does nothing but stay in bed watching TV with the volume turned up to maximum. It is a bleak and unhappy life.
Joe Lon’s living situation is so similar to that of Harry Angstrom’s in Rabbit Run by John Updike that it is hard to imagine that Joe Lon isn’t based on Updike’s most famous character. Both were star athletes in high school who ended up in miserable jobs and living in an unhappy marriage with the unwanted responsibility of raising children. Both are looking for a means of escape and make all the wrong choices up until the end.
A major turning point comes when Berenice returns to Mystic to introduce Joe Lon to her fiance. Joe Lon’s friends agree to get his wife out of their home so he can have a tryst with Berenice. But the seduction is less than romantic; in fact it is downright gross and degrading and from there, all the events of the novel continue on a downward trajectory, getting darker and more destructive as the pages go on until the big blowout during the rattlesnake hunt.
A subplot involving the town’s sheriff, Buddy Matlow, is possibly the most interesting part of the story. Buddy is a Vietnam vet with a wooden leg and a few screws loose in his head. He imprisons a young African American girl and gives her a choice between sleeping with him or being bit by a rattlesnake he keeps in a bucket near her cell. Out of fear, she gives in to him and then he releases her from jail. Even though Buddy is a rapist, he has some strange delusion that she loves him and they are in a relationship together. Later he picks her up in his car, takes her to a place in the woods and Lottie Mae gets her revenge by killing his snake with a razor blade. Go read the book to find our what I mean. What Buddy does with his snake afterwards is one of the most hilarious episodes of gallows humor I have read in a very long time.
Overall the presence of snakes in this narrative is unique and effectively done. The rattlesnake is the high school mascot. They are playthings for the backwoods hicks in Mystic. They show up in people’s dreams. They get eaten for dinner. They serves as artistic inspiration. The snakes figure literally as elements in the plot and metaphorically as symbols of anxiety, pride, masculinity, immorality, sleaziness, and evil. This is a novel packed with unique ideas and the presence of snakes is one that really ties everything together.
The least satisfying part of the novel is with the character of Joe Lon himself. He is a wounded and miserable young man with no direction in life and no idea what to do about it. He drinks liquor compulsively and does little more than cause trouble. He isn’t entirely unsympathetic though. We learn that his mother’s death is the source of his problems and, although he is a racist, he does stand up for the African American characters when no one else will. That much makes him a somewhat well-rounded character. Where he falls short in his development is that he is so unemotional. The narrative and his actions tell us that he is not happy, but he never expresses the kind of despair we are supposed to attach to him. If Crews had delved deeper into his inner emotional turmoil, he would have been stronger as an unsympathetic protagonist with some sympathetic character traits.
A Feast of Snakes is a mean and ugly book about mean and ugly people. This is disturbing literature on a number of levels. The characters are unforgettable and that may not necessarily be a good thing depending on your tolerance for the darker side of humanity. But their unforgettable nature is one of the greatest things about the writing of Harry Crews. They don’t just stick in your head because they are so terrible; they stay there because Harry Crews is such a talented writer. If this work of fiction doesn’t bother you enough, just remember that there are places off the beaten path in rural America that aren’t so different from what we have in this novel.
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