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Summary
Summary
In the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O'Connor, Bill Cheng's Southern Cross the Dog is an epic literary debut in which the bonds between three childhood friends are upended by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. In its aftermath, one young man must choose between the lure of the future and the claims of the past.
Having lost virtually everything in the fearsome storm--home, family, first love--Robert Chatham embarks on an odyssey that takes him through the deep South, from the desperation of a refugee camp to the fiery and raucous brothel Hotel Beau-Miel and into the Mississippi hinterland, where he joins a crew hired to clear the swamp and build a dam.
Along his journey he encounters piano-playing hustlers, ne'er-do-well Klansmen, well-intentioned whores, and a family of fur trappers, the L'Etangs, whose very existence is threatened by the swamp-clearing around them. The L'Etang brothers are fierce and wild but there is something soft about their cousin Frankie, possibly the only woman capable of penetrating Robert's darkest places and overturning his conviction that he's marked by the devil.
Teeming with language that renders both the savage beauty and complex humanity of our shared past, Southern Cross the Dog is a tour de force that heralds the arrival of a major new voice in fiction.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Charged with a swampy sense of foreboding, Cheng's debut novel is set in the early 20th century, in a mythic South populated by leather-clad backwoodsmen, a kind madam, and a barrelhouse piano player with a "mojo bag." Robert Lee Chatham, survivor of a massive flood, grows up working in a brothel. A fall off a roof brings him into contact with bluesman Eli Cutter, who warns, "Bad and trouble is set to follow you through this earth." As an adult, Robert works on a swamp "dig crew" until the day he impulsively jumps into a river and is swept away. He's rescued by a family of feral swamp trappers, only to be abused until he nearly dies. Eventually he's able to slit the throat of one of his captors and flee, ending up in a small town where he reunites with childhood friends Dora and G.D. The three form a happy family of sorts, yet Robert still feels himself slipping into "that place of lost and losing." With its evocative settings and rich McCarthyesque language, this Southern gothic packs a punch like a mean drunk. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A wildly ambitious debut novel--vividly imagined, frequently poetic--conjuring the Southern Delta of the first half of the 20th century as a fever dream, steeped in the blues. One of the most frightening songs by the bluesman Robert Johnson is "Hellhound on My Trail." This narrative suggests an elaboration of Johnson's classic, extended to novel length, filtered through Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. The main musician in the story is a barrelhouse piano player and voodoo shaman, peripheral to the narrative as a whole but pivotal to the life of protagonist Robert Chatham, a boyhood survivor of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. "Houses rose up, bobbled, then smashed together like eggshells. Homes bled out their insides--bureaus, bathtubs, drawers, gramophones--before folding into themselves. The people scrambled up on their roofs, up trees, clinging to one another. The water blew them from their perches, swept them into the drift, smashed them against the debris." Through hopscotching chronology, the plot follows Robert from the apocalyptic flood through a devastating stint as the ward of a bordello (where he meets the piano player who introduces him to both the titular dog and the devil), through his adult years as an itinerant laborer, working to clear the land for a dam that promises "A Shining New South," even as it threatens the livelihood of the backwoods Cajun trappers who give Robert's path another detour. The author's virtuosity occasionally gets the best of him, as when he has Robert's not very reflective or sophisticated father remarking on an evening that finds "everything singing out the great mystery of the world" (which fits thematically but sounds more like a young novelist with an MFA). There are also passages that verge on Faulkner Lite: "The one truth God has ever given to a man. And it's that the past keeps happening to us." Yet it's hard to resist the sweep of Southern history that the author conjures through the experience of his protagonist, the way he makes the devil as palpably real as the natural world that he pervades, blurring the distinction between dreams and destiny. The title suggests a mysterious piece of Southern folk art, and the novel works a similar magic. Not a perfect novel, but a strong voice and a compelling achievement.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In this novel of narcotic heat, biblical storms, virulent racism, bloodshed, mojo, taboo love, and the hell-bent destruction of a teeming wilderness, Cheng dives deeply into the realm of tall tales and blues. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 casts Cheng's young characters out into a world of tooth and claw, gun and knife, brutality and enslavement. Lovely Dora is being held captive by a ruthless man who is looting abandoned houses. Robert, who feels hounded and haunted, has endured his brother's lynching, his mother's madness, and the misery of a government tent city by the time he ends up working for room and board at a friendly brothel. Eli, a piano player of prodigious skill and a healer of dubious powers, tells Robert that he is bad crossed and gives him a pouch to wear to ward off the devil. Robert does miraculously survive harrowing ordeals while working construction on a dam that will bring electricity and full-force capitalism to the South and warring with a savage swamp trapper whose hunter-gatherer existence is doomed. In this brooding, spine-chilling southern odyssey, Cheng's interpretation of a place of bone-deep suffering and rare flashes of grace is bold and piercing, and his darkly rhapsodic language is so imaginative and highly charged that each word seems newly forged.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Robert Lee Chatham, the protagonist of Cheng's hypnotic and lyrical debut, is "bad crossed" - that is to say, cursed or bedeviled. The novel opens in 1927, with Robert and his friends playing in the woods under the first rains of the Great Mississippi Flood. A few days later, Robert and his parents are huddled in a rowboat gliding over the drowned world: "Telegraph poles had collapsed together in a nest of crucifixions, their cables willowing into the dark water." These are the Chathams' last days together - the family finds shelter at a refugee camp where Robert's mother goes mad and his father, in desperation, sends him to work as a live-in errand boy at a brothel. When we next encounter him, he is not yet 21 and already worn out by transience, poverty and lovelessness. The novel leaps somewhat erratically among Robert, his equally bad-crossed childhood friends and a pianist-cum-juju man named Eli. Presumably, the characters are connected by whatever curses them, but this overlay of mysticism verges on superfluous; the horror of their lives has less to do with curses than with poverty, race and displacement caused by the flood. When dealing with matters explicitly racial - the lynching of Robert's older brother, for example - the narrative can feel secondhand. Still, Cheng's characters are finely spun, soulful creatures, and his writing is muscular, evocative and haunting: "The moon was a cataract eye His hummingbird heart smashed itself against his ribs." In passages about the hostile and spooky natural world, or the equally mysterious depths of his characters, Cheng's talent astonishes, and the blues music that so clearly inspired him echoes through the prose.
Library Journal Review
Cheng, an author raised in Queens who lives in Brooklyn, NY, debuts with a novel in the great Southern tradition; think Cormac McCarthy or a 21st-century Faulkner. The story centers on Robert Chatham, a star-crossed African American whose games and first kiss are interrupted by the Mississippi flood of 1927. From the Hollandale refugee camp, Robert is hired as an errand boy at the Beau-Miel Hotel, a surreal brothel burned to the ground by a drunken music promoter. Robert then works as a WPA dynamiter, clearing swamps in rural Mississippi. Later, as an almost-prisoner of a family of feral trappers, the L'Etangs, he becomes involved with the group's lone female member, Frankie. When Robert leaves the L'Etangs, he faces a choice between escaping to the north with Frankie, who herself escaped the swamps, or remaining where he is with the mostly-mad Dora, his first kiss. Curious about the odd title? Wait until the last page. VERDICT This book is a winner for lovers of plot; tough, lyrical writing; history; and the trials of the deep South. [See Prepub Alert, 12/12.]-Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
