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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Vital, Intense Novel Of The Deep South - Superbly Written!, May 14, 2005
Big Jack McCormick owns Camp DoeRun, a cushy hunting lodge built on his own private parcel of West Alabama woods. Flush with game, this singular piece of forest is reserved for McCormick and his fellow huntsmen, a select group of five, in particular. These white men, are all honchos, pillars of their Three Breezes, Alabama community - the sheriff, an attorney, a bank president and McCormick's smarmy right-hand man. They get together regularly, far from their wives and families, their lip service to moral codes and the letter of the law left behind, to catch fish, shoot dove, turkey, and deer, drink, dine well and play with women, brought in especially for their fun and titillation. The aberrant is encouraged. Sometimes, there is just one women for all five, usually a beauty. Then the men would play "The Game."
On a brisk November night in 1958, twelve year-old Cecil Durgin, a "colored orphan," was working up at DoeRun. He had been trained to accompany the hunters, flush the game, skin and field dress deer, cook, clean, fetch and carry. On this one fall evening, which is to mark Cecil's life forever, he witnesses the perverse Game as it is played-out, and the vicious murder at the evening's finale. At his young age, the boy knows, as did most African Americans, that "life could be taken on any whim or mangled on a dare, that his own silence meant life." This lesson is brought home brutally the following morning when Big Jack has a talk with Cecil.
Thirty-two years later, The Reverend Cecil Durgin is, himself, a pillar of the Three Breezes community. He is the owner of radio station WDAB, and has his own show preaching "common-sense scripture," playing Gospel music, imparting local news, and offering spiritual advice. He has become a spokesperson for the black community, and politically, he can deliver the vote. Thus he bargains with those he detests to do what is best for the town's people. He still harbors dark secrets, however, and the resulting neuroses, brought on by his painful childhood, threaten his relatively solid marriage to a woman who loves him and shares his burden. Cecil occasionally drives through McCormick's woods to visit a place haunted by memories of a women long dead, and to think about the guilt he feels for endangering his marriage.
An important election is coming up, one which could significantly impact the ever accumulating wealth of the four remaining DoeRun lodge men. They see Cecil as a major threat to their plans, and although times have changed significantly since that November evening in 1958, they still have the Klan around to do their bidding. The fast paced, taut narrative moves toward a chilling conclusion, gathering momentum and building tension as it goes. Cecil is not the only one scarred by secrets, which are all about to come to light.
Suzanne Hudson paints a dark and disturbing portrait of the south as it was, with its brutal enforcement of strict class and color lines. She vividly depicts the omnipotence of a powerful few who were able to destroy, with impunity, the lives of the innocent, with a single gesture or word. Here men gave more respect and importance to the game they hunted and prized, than to the blacks they lynched. She evokes feelings of gut-wrenching fear and humiliation, as the reader empathizes with the victims of savage inhumanity. Ms. Hudson is a powerful, talented author. I intend to spread the word. This novel is a definite keeper.
JANA
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hard Comedy, Harder Facts, October 8, 2003
This review is from: In a Temple of Trees: A Novel (Hardcover)
Suzanne Hudson's recent novel, In a Temple of Trees, is knockout. Just how good a writer is Hudson? She turns a sexual encounter between a white male abductor and his black female abductee into twenty-three of the funniest pages you'll ever read. Brothers and sisters, if that doesn't take writing skill, then my childhood cracker name wasn't Billy Joe. Those two themes, racism and sexism, predominate the remainder of the novel in a much more serious manner, however. When the Klan appears days after a young black boy named Cecil, witnesses a murder at a white hunting camp, the novel turns as haunted as it was comic. Cecil is sexually debased before the Klan, as is his adopted white Jewish mother. Her reaction? "It was then that she let the fire have her, curling into the bowels of it as if it were some glowing embryonic membrane silencing the world." Set on the Alabama-Mississippi border, the novel's spine revolves around Cecil's reaction, his enduring memory of the rape-murder at the camp. When he witnessed it, he was an apprentice cook for five white men. The men have brought a young woman from over the state line to "entertain" them for the night. When matters turn nasty, young Cecil, who's been befriended by the woman earlier that day, is at a loss to help her. -Guilt over his lack of any helpful reaction haunts Cecil for thirty-two years. Here the plot thickens, for Cecil's inherited a radio station from his adopted white parents (one a Jew, remember, so an outcast in her own manner). And-this should sound familiar to Alabamians-a statewide voter referendum on charging timber companies realistic taxes is forthcoming. Cecil's radio station reaches several pivotal counties where the black vote could swing matters. So . . . Hudson is a master of intertwining suspense, tone, and scenes into a plot that will keep you reading throughout the night. And her characters are so real that you might want to sit with a canister of mace to keep some of them at bay.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a refreshing & intelligent debut, September 14, 2004
This review is from: In a Temple of Trees: A Novel (Hardcover)
Reviewed by Krista McGruder for Small Spiral Notebook
In A Temple of Trees by Suzanne Hudson is refreshing and intelligent in the author's refusal to bow to the namby-pamby literary review chorus. This chorus is sung in praise of novels that shade all the characters with goodness and badness, incorporating review buzzwords such as compassionate and humanizing without any justification for the normative value of that authorial inclination (other than not to offend the purchasing public.) Praise of a literary author's "compassion" toward humanity is already a cliché and is close to becoming a pandemic love-fest, in which no humans-fictional or otherwise-are ever condemned or ever to blame because, hey, we should recognize there's an evil in all of us and while we're at it, please pass the syrupy milk of human kindness.
Thank god or the muse-take your pick-for Suzanne Hudson. Her novel, In A Temple of Trees, a break from her long writing hiatus, features bad characters. Meaning, characters that behave badly, characters that are more flawed than good and characters that are evil. Meaning, also, the author has shrugged off the contemporary literary requirement that novels should underscore humanity and limn motivations in the socio-economic context of youth and while we're at it, what about that relationships with mother?
Whatever. And what a relief that this talented Southern woman has produced a good fire and brimstone type fiction that doesn't shirk from judging who's a sinner and who's a saint. Temple contains villains and good people and saves plenty of nuance for the ones in between. For nuance, Suzanne Hudson focuses primarily on the life of Cecil Durgin, a man who struggles with fidelity toward his wife but who also acts out of conviction in his efforts to bring out the black vote for local causes.
Cecil's story begins in Alabamian timber baron Big John McCormick's deer camp. For those unfamiliar with Southern male hunting rituals, a "deer camp" is usually a cabin tucked deep into the woods outfitted with a card table, latrine, kitchen and in these days, an audio-video system to help pass the time when not crouched in a deer blind. Befitting the era and setting of the early parts of Temple, Big John's buddies come to the camp prepared with dogs, guns and liquor. And of course, the help. The help consists of an older black man who cooks and a "mixed" boy named Cecil Durgin. Of uncertain paternity, Cecil has been adopted by a local couple in which the wife, Miss Sophie Price, is Jewish. After spying on the sex games between the white adult hunters and the white women hired for the purpose, Cecil discovers her dead body and informs Big John. Miss Charity's death will metaphorically and literally haunt Cecil throughout his adulthood.
Cecil's adulthood is set in 1990, again in Three Breezes, Alabama. He is married, his children have grown and left. Cecil owns the radio station his adoptive father had operated. Cecil's admonitions to his listeners are the source of political trouble for the good ole' boys running Big John McCormick's timber trust. Hudson manufactures the local political intrigue and jockeying deftly, framing out conflict with specific scenes to illustrate the persistence of small-town political muscle jobs that can carry large financial consequence.
Concurrent with Cecil's marital and potentially dangerous political dilemma are the moral struggles of other characters including Sophie Price, his wife, Earline and his long-time friend, a white woman named Shug who is part-heir to the timber fortune. Cecil's mistress, a velvet-throated crooner who calls herself Honey, falls into misadventure and the tale of her ordeal is both screamingly funny and grim. Even the ghost of the dead young woman makes appearances, tempering the scenes with reminders that Cecil's past walks the walk with his present.
Hudson writes local color and details that make her "bad" characters easy-if not fun-to imagine. Included in the raft of good ole' boys are Big John's hunting contingent (among them a friend and confidant who had relations with his daughter,) Shug's husband and a comic-relief duo of brother criminals. Hudson's exceptional at assigning identity to each of the characters. Though all white and all bad, we never confuse the embezzler with the kidnapper, the hinted-at-gay good ole' boy with the waspy, porn-loving, Christian financial manager.
Temple doesn't shrink from the elephant in the room. Race and issues of racial paternity command as much stage time as the characters and dramatic conflict. Notions of family and friendship are strained over the facts of Cecil's paternity; both his black and white families are reluctant to tell what they know as truth. Bitterness runs deep on both sides of the white and black family branches.
If Temple has any soft spots, it lies in Hudson's dedication to preserving dialect and speech mannerisms. Though accuracy in depiction has always been a strong suit of Southern writers, she opens herself to potential criticism that she's writing the "stock" evil white man or the "cliché" rich, drunken and imperious Southern widow. I didn't find the characterizations to be a problem, but that's probably because I've spent too much time arguing with Northern literary critics that despite their claims of hunters and belles being "caricatures," people in the South...really...do....talk...like...that. And act like that too.
Readers should enjoy Hudson's novel, if not only for the unraveling of its decades-long mystery but for a tour through the woods of the South, where they'll encounter "The faint smell of must wool, cedar-chipped smoke, and sticky sap...."
And also bad guys. No-possibility-of-compassion-or-humanizing bad guys.
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