It’s better to burn out than to fade away. Or so sang Neil Young in his classic song “My My Hey Hey”, a tribute to Sid Vicious even though the name is changed to Johnny Rotten to fit the rhyme scheme of the lyrics. So when reading the earlier works of Harry Crews, you might be forgiven for thinking the Southern Gothic master of grit lit would be more likely to burn out. He came from a rough town and lived a rough life on a steady diet of whiskey and cocaine. But when reading Scar Lover, one of his last novels, you find that he faded away instead.
This novel is full of scars in a similar way to how his earlier novel A Feast of Snakes use ubiquitous snakes as a literary device. The main character, Pete Butcher, doesn’t have any visible scars. Instead he has a self-inflicted mental scar due to an accident when he hit his younger brother Jon in the forehead with a hammer, leaving a scar there and causing permanent brain damage to the poor kid, kind of like an unintentional lobotomy. Jon got put away in an institution and their parents died in a fire while trying to sell a pig to raise enough money to support Jon. So Pete blames himself for the demise of the family. He becomes sullen and withdrawn, indulging in self-hatred, pushing away anyone who tries to get close to him. An elderly man named Mr. Winekoff who is kindly and friendly, but also nosy and a bit daft tries to bring Pete out of himself and Pete doesn’t react with kindness. But Mr. Winekoff (Is that meant to sound like “wank off”?) serves as a bridge between Pete and the family next door where an attractive young woman learns about Pete from Winekoff’s gossip. Her name is Sarah and she introduces herself to Pete. Later they fall in love and he moves in with her and her parents, a hard working and honest man named Henry Leemer who makes a living by chopping wood and her mother Gertrude Leemer who returns from the hospital after having her breasts amputated because of cancer.
When Henry Leemer dies, Sarah and her mother are faced with the dilemma of what to do with his body and how to use their inheritance money. This is when George and Linga become important to the story. George is Pete’s friend and collegue; together they share a miserable job unloading freight cars. George is Jamaican and has horseshoe scars branded across his back which he believes give him magical powers. His wife Linga is an obeah woman and cult leader with colorful, decorative scars all over her face. I can’t tell if they are actually tattoos or not as Harry Crews doesn’t explain it in much detail. Anyhow, Gertrude Leemer decides to put Linga in charge of the funeral ceremony and the disposal of Harry Leemer’s body. Unfortunately, Linga is a grifter and Gertrude Leemer has also put her in charge of managing the inheritance money. On the good side though, Linga has also agreed to help reunite Pete with his lost brother Jon.
So far so good. The character development is strong. It deals with flawed but realistic people who have realistic dilemmas. Pete is a broken man but he isn’t beyond repair and Sarah has the strength of character to help him with what he needs. Henry and Gertrude are unique and strong in their own ways as are George and Linga.
But the narrative kind of fizzles out when Linga enters the story. Initially Harry’s corpse had been taken to the morgue, but Gertrude decides she wants to cremate him herself. So Linga and her husband George take Pete to the funeral parlor to retrieve Mr. Leemer’s dead body. For some reason I can’t comprehend, Crews stretches this segment out to an unnecessary length. They go on a long car ride to the funeral home, take lots of breaks to smoke weed, and carry the body out to the car. In fact, the narrative stops for their pot smoking breaks so many times it becomes redundant without serving any useful purpose in the story. For all its detail and page count, this stretch of prose doesn’t enhance either the character development or the plot in any way that is necessary. We do learn how domineering Linga can be and how she uses threats and intimidation to get her way, but this could have been said more effectively with less wordage. The same can be said for the funeral ceremony they hold in the swamp. It’s all a bit morbid and macabre, but Crews doesn’t overdo those elements in order to keep the characters’ humanity in the forefront. But again, this passage is extended unnecessarily so much so that it would have had a more powerful impact if it had been shorter.
In the end, all conflicts get confronted and Harry Crews demonstrates how a woman who is ordinary but strong and sincere can work the magic that is needed to bring out the best in a man, namely her future husband Pete Butcher. In contrast, Linga, the exotic obeah woman who practices magic, is nothing but a money grubbing leech and her magic is nothing but a smokescreen to hide her true nature. Crews shows us how the real power of a woman is in the everyday world right in front of our eyes. It doesn’t dazzle the senses, but it is potent and it is there if we look for it. The biggest problem I had with all this was that the story has no real confrontational climax at the end. As the story goes on, it is clear that Pete doesn’t believe in Linga’s magic and sees her for the con artist she is, but he never actually gets into a fight with her over it and the end of the story is weak as a result.
Scar Lover is obviously the work of an aging author. It doesn’t have the manic energy or the shock value of Harry Crews’ earlier novels. But you can tell he has grown as a person by the time he wrote it. While the themes and content are more mature, the actual prose suffers from a lack of energy. It’s still Harry Crews and his fans will probably find something to like here, but it doesn’t live up to his earlier works. It’s best if you read some of those before picking this one up.
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