Customer Reviews

Visits from the Drowned Girl: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Benny Poteat, tower-climber, part-time fry cook and full-time redneck witnesses (from his perch on a tower) a young woman set up a video camera and tripod, strip off her clothes, walk into a river and drown herself.

Benny packs up all her belongings, which include a series of videotapes she made as a film student, and hides them in his duplex. He doesn't report the incident and instead watches the tapes one by one over a series of weeks.

Why does the girl drown herself? Why doesn't Benny report what he's seen and hand over the girl's stuff? Your guess is as good as Steven Sherrill's.

Although alive with colorful characters, the novel is deeply unsatisfying and frustrating--purposely frustrating--to the reader because it sets up intriguing questions which the author has no intention of answering.

It's also really, really gross. Besides countless scenes of Benny masturbating, the reader is also treated to: two acts of semi-public male on male fellatio, gang rape, gang dog-on-dog rape, and attempted goat-on-midget rape. And that is just a partial list. Also difficult to read, though lower on the gross-out scale, is Benny's senseless, passive, motiveless cruelty.

But yet more offensive--and more BORING-- is that the novel, like the pretentious film-school videos made by the drowned girl, is fumbling toward some "statement" about Art: Benny is Us. We are all voyeurs. All art is a porno because we sit passively and watch the participants. Or some such tedious falderal.

Sherrill accurately (and, I think, intentionally) depicts the reaction his readers are likely to have to "Drowned Girl" through Benny's reaction to the drowned girl's movies:

"Benny paused the tape. Sat back in the rocker. Sighed. He didn't think he could stand another night of pretentious nonsense. Benny needed some sense of progress, of forward motion."

Benny keeps watching, but many people probably won't keep reading.

It's both sad and annoying to see such an evidently talented writer waste his time (and ours) on a book which is designed NOT to please on any level whatsoever. The small minority of people who like their art offensive, annoying, and unpleasant may not regret the time they spend reading this, but most everyone else will.

Ditto to the reviewers who panned this book. I find it annoying when a writer of such obvious ability wastes everyone's time condescending to cartoon characters, faux crackers with names like Jeeter, Dink and Doodle, whose incomes are derived from tropical fish maintenance, hash-slinging, and off-hours fellatio. A mash-up of motiveless incidents, gratuitous, distasteful, unkind and grotesque, weakly strung together by the theme of sequential viewing of videotapes left by a young woman whose drowning suicide the hero, Benny Poteat, witnesses. Little information is gleaned in sum and none illuminating. The author could not pay me to raise the least interest in these characters or the story -- he shows equal weary indifference for these former and his audience. Please.

I picked this up at the library, having never heard of Minotaur. I loved it -- and I read voluminously across a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction. The characters are certainly believable and the side-excursions into various not-quite-relevant-to-the-plot topics are the best part. I *know* people like Benny and Dink. He has captured the true flavor of parts of the deep south. I laughed outloud, I winced, I marveled at the outrageousness of some of the story lines (Max was especially despicable). I swear I could taste the hushpuppies. At heart, it's a darn good yarn. Don't listen to the critics! Just go read it.

I purchased the audio book version to listen to during Jury Duty. The author often prattled on and on in his descriptions of items and/or scenes, describing the same object or occurrence (however mundane and uninteresting) as many as ten or more times in various ways. He was obviously trying much too hard to be "artistic" with his descriptions, which didn't mesh with the stupid and simpleton personality of the main character. I finished the book out of morbid curiosity and definitely not because I liked it (which I did not). A more appropriate title, I think, would be "The Diary of a Psychotic Hillbilly". You learn to really despise the main character for his passive cruelty. The ending left a lot of questions that I, quite frankly, don't even care about. I only gave it 2 stars because it wasn't quite so intolerable that I couldn't finish it (but almost). If you don't like foul language, this is definitely not a book for you. The number of times the "f word" is thrown about and the subject of many of the conversations are the epitome of vulgar.

This is a fantastic book about the effects of secrets on a persons life. When Benny Poteat witnesses a girl drown herself, he finds the video tapes and camera that she left behind. After an embarassing incident involving a stubbed toe and a chocolate penis he can't bring himself to report the death.

To find out more about the girl who died he starts watching the tapes. He also meets and starts dating her midget sister. the book shifts effortlessly from moments of extreme darkness to great comedy (I laughed out loud when the dog chose the wrong moment to vomit up Becky's knickers).

Benny is a strangely sympathetic central character despite his increasingly unforgivable behaviour. He certainly isn't likable but even his most unlikely actions seem reasonable when we look through his eyes. His voyeurism turns to outright cruelty by the end of the book as a side-effect of keeping the secret for so long.

I cannot recommend this book enough. The prose style is hypnotic, the characters well drawn, sympathetic and believable, the dialogue crisp and frequently very funny, and the story flows with the force of the river the girl drowns herself in in chapter one.

There is some detail which isn't for the squeamish but I ain't squeamish.
An easy 5 stars

From the top of a watertower, Benny Poteat sees something he isn't suppose to see-a beautiful young woman, setting up a video camera, taking off her clothes, and then calmly walking into the water to drown. Benny nervously climbs down the tower making his way to the riverbank where it happened, knowing full well that it is too late to save her. He gathers her clothes, her video camera, and the video tapes left in her bag, tosses them into his pickup truck and rushes home dazed and frightened as though he had somehow caused her death. He turns one question over and over in his mind, "What do you do after watching someone die?"

He doesn't go to the police, instead he keeps what he saw to himself. Paralyzed by a need to be close to the drowned girl he watches the video tapes she purposely left behind. Then he searches and finds the drowned girl's sister, Becky Hinkey. Yet, rather than telling Becky what he saw, he starts dating her. He holds her while she cries over her missing sister. He considers telling her what he saw. But then he wonders--has too much time past? Would it seem suspicious? Would it look as though he had something to do with it? His frustration builds, he wishes he had gone to the police, but he didn't and now he doesn't know what to do. He considers telling Jeeter, his best friend, "One time, when they were both drunk, Benny asked Jeeter if he believed in angels. `Shut-up, Benny.' That was the closest Benny ever came to talking about it."

Sherrill's humor is steeped in southern literary tradition with its dark, grotesque quality. He carefully weaves the lives of his oddball characters to create a most believable and compelling story. Becky Hinkey, while the most normal of all the characters, is a midget. Jeeter is most at home on a motorcycle and in a flea market. He prefers spending his energies on rigging up a vibrating passenger seat on his motorcycle to arouse his female passengers. And then there's Doodle and Dink. Doodle, Benny's neighbor and a waitress at the Nub & Honey where he sometimes works. Dink, a friend with serious issues of his own. We laugh and sympathize with the midget stuffed in the giant pumpkin; we laugh and feel ill from the dog "sicking up" a pair of panties; we laugh and sympathize for Jeeter's date, who is deeply bruised by his vibrating seat device.

Like the mischievous boy in second grade who always got away with shooting spitballs because he could charm the socks off the teacher, Sherrill's poetic style and ear for rhythm lets him get away with telling us anything he wants.

[...]

I am sad to say I would give this book no stars if possible. True, the writing is fine enough; but, paradoxically, this is one of the most disappointing things about the book. Mr. Sherrill has talent as a writer, but his sensibility here is off to the extent that is seems a waste of talent to have written this book. Visits relies on shock value and grotesqueness for its momentum. These are stock items, not creativity. There are parts of the book that I sincerely believe are plainly misogynistic. Writing talent is only half the necessary package; the other half is sensibility. This story has few, if any, redeeming qualities. Mr. Sherrill should have written it and tucked it away, then moved on to subject matter that interests and entertains the reader--and perhaps adds some insight to human nature and to our plights as human beings. All this book does is wallow in stereotypes of "white trash" culture--if you can call what Sherrill displays here "culture."

It's hard to believe that the same mind that produced the intelligent, moving, and fantastic Minotour Takes a Cigarette Break, wrote Drowned Girl. Visits From A Drowned Girl is indeed a dark book, which I usually like. Fortunately, Sherrill's writing ability showed moments of the magic from his previous book, to keep me reading this one. But I was left feeling empty... what was the point of the darkness? No overall message seemed to eek out... or justify some of the really awful things the main character did. The characters seemed a bit contrived, the dialogue and plot (and subplots) forced and disconnected. Really, a big disappointment. If you are interested in this author (even if you're not) definately read his first novel, skip this one, and hope for better in the future.

Steven Sherrill in his second book does something that very few modern writers are often willing to do, potentially alienate an audience. While stylistically similar to his first novel, the mood of the work takes a drastic turn. What it creates for the reader are two characters, one who embodies the positive qualities in a person and another the negative. After crafting the low but loveable Minotaur, a victim of society's prejudices and an everstanding tribute to the human spirit, he creates the yang to the Minotaur's yin with Benny Poteat. Benny Poteat embodies the negatives in us, our fear, our passivity, and our insincerity. While the Minotaur is reassuring, Benny is damning. Fans of the style and characters of the first book will have a better experience with this new novel, due to the greater refinement in characters (there are no more arbitrary villains like in Minotaur) and increased intensity of writing. However, fans expecting the same warm feeling left from the Minotaur will soon be crushed by the dark psychosis of this new protagonist.

I've read this book 3 times from front to back. It's weird, dark, and disturbing - and hilarious. It's a strange combination that makes it absolutely amazing. Invest a mere few dollars into buying this book - it's a unique trip.