Wolf Whistle [Hardcover]

Lewis Nordan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 10, 1993

ALA Notable Book; 1994 Mississippi Writers Award for Fiction; 1994 Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. In WOLF WHISTLE, Lewis Nordan unleashes the hellhounds of his prodigious imagination on one of the most notorious racial killings of the century, the Emmett Till murder. Soon we're on a magical mystery tour of the Southern psyche of the mid-1950s and the dawning of guilt and recognition in a whole generation of white Southerners. "An immense and wall-shattering display of talent. WOLF WHISTLE will help usher Lewis Nordan into the Hall of Fame of American Letters."--Randall Kenan, The Nation.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Though he writes Southern gothic novels that invite comparison to the works of T. R. Pearson, James Wilcox and Clyde Edgerton, Nordan creates a distinctively weird and fanciful world of his own, peopled by impoverished, eccentric and grotesque characters. The setting for his fourth novel (after Music in the Swamp ) is Arrow Catcher, Miss., a Delta town where magic can emerge from squalor and prejudice can be transcended by youthful idealism. Against this background, Nordan tells an alternative version of the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, the teenager visiting from Chicago who transgressed Deep South taboos by whistling at a white woman. Here Till is called Bobo, and like all the characters--white-trash rednecks and blacks alike--he is portrayed as essentially uneducated, speaking a highly ungrammatical vernacular, and condemned to a life circumscribed by rabid racism. In reproducing the speech and behavior of his humble characters, Nordan does not condescend; he faithfully renders the narrow, wretched lives of Delta inhabitants, particularly the oppressed black people, and the hopelessness of their lot. (Emmett/Bobo's murderers go free.) Propelled by Nordan's musical prose, much of this narrative soars above the commonplace into the realm of myth. Sometimes, however, Nordan is betrayed by his own rhetoric and by a compulsion to wax rhapsodic. In striving for an apocalyptic vision, he overreaches his ability to hold readers inside his bizarre alternate world. Nonetheless, this is an unforgettable story by a writer of great talent.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The wolf whistle of the title comes from Bobo, a black teenager from Chicago visiting in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi. Directed at the wife of the town's most prominent white resident, this whistle soon leads to Bobo's murder. Based on the Emmett Till lynching, which occurred near Nordan's hometown in 1955, this flamboyant novel by the author of Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair ( LJ 9/15/83) examines the intertwined fates of blacks and poor whites in the Mississippi delta. Like a blues song by Robert Johnson, to whom Nordan frequently alludes, the text depicts loneliness, alcoholism, unrequited love, and brutal violence but elevates it all to a higher (and sometimes highly comic) aesthetic plane. Nordan displays some of Faulkner's lyricism and Flannery O'Connor's surreal humor but emerges as a unique and powerful Southern storyteller in his own right.
- Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 308 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books; 1st edition (January 10, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565120280
• ISBN-13: 978-1565120280
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,607,304 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious, dark, and tragic---and hilarious, February 22, 2004

By 

Jeri Massi "keen on the grace of God" (Raleigh, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wolf Whistle (Paperback)

Whew! What a book! I've never read anything like this before. Loosely based on the lynching of 14 year old Emmet Till in 1955 (for whistling at a white woman), Nordan's novel is as far away from a crime novel as you can get. A grim and bizarre comedy of callous, drunk, and stupid people, the telling of this tale took me to new destinations in odd but often hilarious ways of telling a story. From the fourth grade teacher who takes her students on a field trip to a mortuary to watch an embalming, to the drunk, befuddled, savvy, vicious, and remorseful Gregg who decides to murder his family except for his eldest daughter (lest she miss her wedding), the residents of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi abound in eccentric, twisted, and macabre individuals (most of them drunk most of the time).

The hard realities of racial segregation and deep poverty and ignorance keep one foot of the novel in reality. The murder of fourteen year old Bobo is just barely made tragic. It's striking and believable, in spite of a certain bizarre style of narrative.

Overall the narrative holds the reader tightly to itself, but there were a couple rare places where a savvy editor could have lopped off an entire page and spared the reader from an authorial excess.

There's no mystery here: you know who commits the crime. There's no forensic story at all. This is a novel of who did it and what they were thinking and how the different residents of the small community were effected by the impact of the tragedy.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unbelievably rich, December 17, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Wolf Whistle (Paperback)

This book tells an often retold tale in such a dramatic way that you feel you are living it and remembering the murder, the southern town racism, along with the author. I read it and read it again. Then bought it for my collection. Then went and read another title by the author...which didn't live up to this one, but how could it?

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well done, March 24, 2000

By 

S. A. Loibner II "Loibner" (Little Rock, Arkansas United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wolf Whistle (Paperback)

Lewis Nordan always manages to write great novels, and WOLF WHISTLE is no exception. This book is a little more serious than his other novels, but, somehow, it still manages to be very funny. At times, you want to laugh out loud. At other times, you want to cry. It is an emotional roller coaster: one of the best books to come out of the south.