Customer Reviews

Boy with Loaded Gun: A Memoir

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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.

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.

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

In a world where everyone who ever endured a three-day suspension from middle school writes a histrionic tell-all memoir, it's a deep pleasure to read a memoir that fills what ought to be the requirements for any: 1. the experiences described are truly memorable; and 2. the book is written by a gifted writer who obviously does his work.

I say from now on unless both requirements are met, don't read the memoir.

Read this one.

If you want to know the tone of this Nordan book just check out the last few pages. It's just a wonderful little blurb about Buddy and his wife and guns. His books are embedded in an almost mystical realism. You realize it is true, it just seems a little exaggerated in places. However, this is what makes it lovable. The many bizarre explorations a reader takes into Nordon's life are truly captivation. His insight into alcoholism, infidelity, and growing up in the deep south are a pure delight. The humor mixes with traSgedy perfection. The writing is so conversational you feel like you are talking to the lanky-bearded man himself. A joy to read. Just watch out for those 'Amazing Technicolor Effing Machines'.

I have read all of Nordan's previous works and this memoir is up to the same quality. As a memoir, it is not a comprehensive "then, and then, and then" recounting of Buddy's life to date. Rather, he chose certain moments or times to exemplify his life. It was also wonderful to discover the man behind the stories. Although not mandatory, I would recommend reading his fiction before this memoir. Buddy, if you read this, I hope you are hard at work on the next book!

The previous reviewer calls Buddy Nordan the next new Faulkner. I predict that in a few years, we'll be bestowing high praise on new authors by pronouncing them "the next new Nordan." This is the first I've read by the author, and I've already ordered the others. You won't be able to get enough of this stuff.

Excellent! Nordan's Memoir is as engaging as his fiction. If you haven't read Lewis Nordan, you're missing the best of contemporary writing.

Lewis Nordan is superior prose stylist, and his memoir BOY WITH LOADED GUN--which he describes in the preface as a mingling of fact and fancy--presents the reader with a series of scenes from a life that both collapses and then reconstructs through a combination of personal compulsion and unexpectedly sharp (and often humorous) encounters with life and death.

An extremely episodic work, BOY WITH LOADED GUN is divided into three portions, the first detailing Nordan's childhood in Itta Bena, Mississippi; the second his youth, first marriage, and rising alcoholism; and the third his painful recovery--complete with set-backs--from a life-time of self-destructive compulsion. The most successful of these portions is the first. Nordan effortlessly captures the eccentricties of growing up in post-war in prose that bespeaks the South in every aspect, and if BOY WITH LOADED GUN consisted of this portion only it would still find a special niche among the best of Southern belles lettres.

But life does not end with childhood, and the remainder of the book follows Nordon's life as it first unravels and then as he attempts (with many a set back) to knit it up again. Just as Nordan was unable to organize these portions of his life in the living, so is he unable to organize them on the page, and although the work remains stylistically flawless it becomes so extremely episodic that it lacks focus. After making such a long and frequently painful journey through Nordan's life, I expected him to offer a cummulative statement that would bring the diverse elements of his memoir into focus as the book neared its conclusion. But there is none--and this undercuts any sense of purpose the book might have. It is beautifully written, but there seems little point to it beyond writing beautifully.

Several [people] have suggested that Nordan is the "next William Faulkner." I can only assume these [people] have never read William Faulkner, for neither Nordan's style nor his material is remotely like anything Faulkner ever wrote. In tone of voice, however, Nordan does recall such authors as Eudora Welty and Harper Lee--particularly when writing of his childhood.

Like Walker Percy, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Thomas Wolfe, Lewis Nordan is a man simultaneously blessed and cursed with the ability to record the everyday dramatic reality that is the American South. The characters who populate Nordan's hometown of Itta Bena, Mississippi need no authorial license in their description; they're ready to walk directly onto the pages of any novel. Nordan is the quintessential Southern witness; like Quentin Compson or the Reverend Hightower, he sees clearly not only what is before him but also the confused myth of Southern history. Nordan is equally adept in rendering layers of character, especially, of course, his own.

Initially, this vision is the source of great humor. An eight year old Nordan renders himself unconscious when, at the sight of the truck delivering his family's first TV, he swan dives off the front porch. Here is the Itta Bena version of the infant Mozart fainting away at the sound of the trumpet.

Quickly, though, it's clear that such a sensibility is a liability. The clouds gather inexorably throughout this chronicle as Nordan moves from childhood witness to adult actor. As Nordan descends into self destruction through alcoholism and marital infidelity, traits rendered poignantly and comically in his descriptions of his step-father, the reader is sunken into the darker world of the Southern writer.

Fashioning himself a hipster, Nordan steals away to New York City as a teenager. This episode alone, excerpted in Harper's last year, is worth the price of the book. Nordan has a fascinating and disturbing story to tell, unlike a fair 90% of the folks writing in this strangely popular form.