Boy with Loaded Gun: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Lewis Nordan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2000

Lewis Nordan is famous for his special vision of the Mississippi Delta. His characters, for whom the closest-though hopelessly inadequate-description might be "eccentrics," share the stage with swamp elves and midgets living in the backyard. His fiction is unlike anybody else's and is as dark, hilarious, and affecting as any ever written.

It's also writing that lays bare the agony of adolescence and plows, as the Cleveland Plain Dealer once put it, "the fields of puzzling wonder that precede the responsibilities and disappointments of adulthood."

What bred and fed Nordan's imagination, his originality, his indefatigable sense of humor? The answers aren't obvious. But now that Lewis Nordan produces, directs, and stars in his own story, we just might find out.

Nordan's mother was widowed when he was a baby, and she went back to her home town to remarry and raise her only son "Buddy." Itta Bena, Mississippi, was a prototypical fifties Delta town, so drowsy that even before puberty, Nordan had made his escape plans. What happened next was pretty typical-a stint in the Navy, college in Mississippi, very early marriage, young fatherhood, alcoholism, infidelities, broken hearts. But in Nordan's hands, the typical turns into the transcendent and, at the heart of things, there is always the irrepressible laughter.

Horrible things and horribly funny things happen in Boy with Loaded Gun, but it's that heart that leads us through Lewis Nordan's dark tunnel and back into the light.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In only the first of many profoundly self-destructive acts in his memoir Boy with Loaded Gun, Lewis "Buddy" Nordan dons a Superman cape, shrieks in excitement at the arrival of his family's new TV, and leaps off his porch as if to fly. A few seconds later, his forehead strikes the concrete, Buddy is laid out cold, and a number of all-too-enduring patterns have taken root, including a lifelong fascination with power and fathers and flight. To Nordan's credit, he doesn't knock you over the head with the metaphorical implications of this or any of the other escapades that follow. Instead, he lets one improbably cinematic vignette build on another: the time he met his alcoholic father's midget ex-girlfriend; the time he ran away to New York and was rescued from his own drunkenness by a suspiciously short elevator operator; the time he mail-ordered a gun. ("Eventually I tried to kill my father, of course.") With a life like this, how is it that Nordan has never written a memoir before? The curious recurrence of midgets alone would have been too much temptation for many a lesser talent.

One of the book's most acute pleasures is Nordan's account of his childhood in the wonderfully named Itta Bena, Mississippi. (The Chickasaw words--reputed by local legend to mean "Home in the Woods"--actually mean "to build a house of crossed logs.") Growing up in Itta Bena, of course, is all about getting out of Itta Bena, but once Nordan does, things go downhill fast. In the typically sordid progression of alcohol and infidelity that follows, we miss, as readers, Itta Bena's certainties: they are comfortable, especially to rebel against, and Nordan's account of them is like a well-crafted coming-of-age novel. In contrast, the myriad ambiguities of grown-up life seem less grand, even less true, than fiction. Still, who else has ever attained understanding by confronting his "inner midget"? The general outlines of Nordan's ascent from hell may be familiar--the church basements, what he calls his "Don't Drink meetings"--but the particulars never are (cf. the chapter titled "The Amazing Technicolor Effing Machine"). Nordan is an original, a storyteller of great and unusual gifts, and in Boy with Loaded Gun, readers reap the fruits of both his present happiness and his past unhappiness. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

Nordan, a novelist (Wolf Whistle; Lightning Song) who savors the darkly comic possibilities of human folly, chronicles his own bad behavior in this rueful, notably candid memoir of an "odd child" who grows into a wayward adult. Grief, loss and dislocation are his earliest memories: when Nordan is 18 months old, his father dies and his mother moves them to tiny Itta Bena, Miss. After she remarries, Nordan longs for his lost father while gradually accepting his new one, a distant but loving alcoholic housepainter. Television introduces a wider world beyond the delta, which young "Buddy" begins contacting via mail-order. He buys a pistol through a magazine ad and tries to shoot his stepfather. Fortunately, the gun misfires, but the pattern is set: throughout life, Nordan will yearn for what's lost, reject what love he has and generally act like a destructive, self-centered jerk. His misadventures stem from bad judgment (to impress a woman, he puts his infant son on a neighbor's horse; the boy survives the incident, but the horse doesn't) and genuine tragedy (his second son dies hours after birth; his first son commits suicide while in college). Alcoholism, infidelity and an implausible knack for attracting weirdos are described with a bracing mix of forthrightness and novelistic exaggeration. Nordan's characteristic wit crops up, though the effect is more stinging (and the prose more subdued) than the redemptive humor of his acrobatically lyrical fiction. "The self-blame book is not the book I want to write, and not the one I suspect anyone wants to read," he contends. Not to worry: Nordan avoids self-flagellation and solipsism, fashioning instead a memoir that achieves hard-won introspection and strikes a tone of weary sadness and wonderment that Buddy turned out okay after all. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 300 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books; 1st edition (January 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565121996
• ISBN-13: 978-1565121997
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,216,507 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funny and heartbreaking memoir, February 5, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Boy with Loaded Gun: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Perhaps it is best to start by reading the fiction of Lewis Nordan before tackling his memoir, as the author of the previous customer review states. However, this book was my introduction to the writing of Lewis Nordan and I was equally impressed. It's a shame that more people have not discovered this writer. I had a chance to meet him last week. He is a very down-to-earth, kind gentleman that immediately connected with the small audience that came to hear him speak. Do yourself a favor and buy this or any of his books. He's a legend in the making.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I really dig this guy, February 2, 2000

By 

Darren Toth - See all my reviews

This review is from: Boy with Loaded Gun: A Memoir (Hardcover)

This is a great book for anyone who is a fan of Lewis "Buddy" Nordan. In his Memoir, the reader is invited into the reality behind his fiction, seeing where all his wonderful and vivid characters come from. Nordan's story is a valuable contribution to all writers in the way it shows the evolution of his own life. This, however, is not a Nordan starter book. Without knowing Sugar Mecklin, Runt, and Hydro, the effect of the book is not as powerful. If you've never read this wonderful author, find him as soon as you can. His writing is a true joy to read. I can't recomend it enough.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nordan's double helping of alcoholism, fantasy, and loss, May 25, 2003

By 

Dayne A. Sherman "daynesherman" (Hammond, LA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Boy with Loaded Gun: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Lewis "Buddy" Nordan writes a memoir -- sort of.

Often times his memoir reads like a tell-all tale, and at other times like a novel about Nordan himself. The line between fact and fiction is rather hard to ascertain. Boy with Loaded Gun is difficult to pigeonhole into any traditional classification. However, fans will be pleased and new readers will be amazed with his eighth book.

Nordan confesses to cooking up conversations, changing names, and exaggerating. What's left is an immanently readable, laugh your head right off, story about growing up in the Mississippi Delta town of Itta Bena and the haywire adulthood Nordan lived upon leaving Mississippi in the 1940s and 50s.

For Nordan aficionados, the book touches on the perennial themes of his fiction. Beginning with his first collection of short stories published by LSU Press in 1983 Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair, to his most recent novel Lighting Song, loneliness and grief take center stage, along with a double helping of alcoholism, fantasy, and a Gothic sense of doom and loss.

What makes Nordan's writing engaging is a sense of redemption. His characters are on a quest somewhat like the wayfarers Louisiana novelist Walker Percy wrote about. For Nordan, humor makes suffering and pain bearable.

The memoir begins with the early death of his father when Nordan was a baby. Soon his mother would remarry, this time to a drunk. Nordan's stepfather came home each day from work to retire to his bedroom, where he would drink beer until sleep. Each morning he'd awake to ritual puking. Unfortunately, Nordan followed in his stepfather's footsteps.

He was a bizarre teen, one often obsessed with sex and other fantasies. As a teenager, Nordan ordered a military surplus pistol from the back pages of a magazine and attempted to bushwhack his stepfather in cold blood. The gun mysteriously jammed; thus saving the boy from murder and providing a title for the book.

After a stint in the Navy, Nordan attended the Methodist Millsaps College in Jackson, where he found easy sex in the parking lot outside the women's dormitory. He and his partner quickly and ludicrously eloped. In graduate school, he bummed around with hippies, did drugs, lived on a farm, and had illicit trysts with the first real hippie he met. This was a life far removed from the confines of Itta Bena, though his departure wasn't far from the rural South. Dissipation, it seems, can be found in the remotest hamlets of the Bible Belt, even around Auburn, Alabama, where he studied for the Ph.D. in English.

The memoir has all the components of a good southern novel. It's sprinkled with drunkards, midgets, racial angst over the Emmett Till lynching, pathological liars, sexual perversion, and even an unclaimed corpse that is kept on display for several decades at a Mississippi funeral home.

In one of the book's saddest moments, Nordan's college-aged son committed suicide. Years earlier, a child by his first wife died at birth. Perhaps the suicide served as a catalyst for the author to finally grow up. It appears that Nordan eventually learned to take responsibility and to call his grief by name.

The story ends with a surreal book tour stop in New Orleans, the land of dreamy dreams. By then Nordan was a published author and teacher of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, remarried and reconciled with wife number two, and on the wagon.

Readers may learn more than they wish about the real Buddy Nordan.

No, readers will love this book, and not just long-time Nordan fans. They won't love it because of his now public failures, but because he's got the guts to tell the tale, and because of the life-affirming laughter in every page. As always, Nordan writes beautifully, even if he had to jumble up the facts to avoid being sued.

-------------Reviewed by Dayne Sherman