REVIEW : The Bard comes to 1930s Ozarks
Posted on Sunday, September 11, 2005
The Pitcher Shower by Donald Harington, The Toby Press, 202 pages, $22.95.
Fayetteville writer Donald
Harington’s latest, The Pitcher Shower,
doesn’t land us in his fabled
Arkansas backwoods town of Stay More, but rather the slightly less remote towns all around it as we follow the antics of Landon "Hoppy" Boyd. A Stay More native, Hoppy is a Depression-era traveling man who earns a modest living going to different small towns in the Ozark Mountains and showing westerns from a film projector rigged to the back of his truck. The title of the book is "pitcher" shower because it’s what all the characters call a movie: a pitcher (not picture) show. The word is spelled correctly in the book only when it’s written on signs. When Hoppy arrives, in his black 10-gallon cowboy hat, juggling and doing magic tricks before the show, he creates a stir at the "twelve pretty little towns on his circuit, from Osage in the north to Ozark in the south, Wesley in the west to Tilly in the east." The townsfolk wait for him like Christmas, and every place he goes, he reconnects with memorable store owners, children and would-be girlfriends. The ladies, even the "clock stoppers," never make much romantic headway with Hoppy, bogged down as he is by self-hatred of everything from his inability to tell a story and his fear of heights to the way the audiences (unjustifiably, to his mind) adore him. Hoppy hates himself most of all for his love-making skills, or rather the lack thereof. He’s his own worst enemy, blind to his humorous and decent self, and his existence is a lonely one until he’s captivated by the multitalented and irrepressible Sharline, who maneuvers her way into his life through a surefire combination of sex appeal, manipulation and making herself "terrible useful right off the bat."
A LITTLE PECULIAR Hoppy spends a week in each of the towns on his circuit and gives a nightly showing of a serial western and Hopalong Cassidy feature that are sure crowd-pleasers. Things are running along fairly smoothly until Hoppy and Sharline lose the films. Desperate for something to show the expectant audience in the next town, they get their hands on a copy of Max Reinhardt’s 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Everything gets a little peculiar from there. Life imitates art (as it has throughout the novel … Hoppy can make it rain with one of his westerns), and Hoppy begins to be a little uncertain himself about what’s real, and what’s just a dream.
It’s a testament to Harington’s skill that his characters might remind one of psychological universals. Hoppy suffers from low self-esteem. Brother Emmett Binns, a circuit-riding preacher reminiscent of a Flannery O’Connor creation, is plaintive and pleading one moment, threatening and violent the next, shamelessly hypocritical, paranoid, unfettered by the boundaries of good manners or even a modicum of decency. Clearly he has a personality disorder. Hoppy and Sharline have their own "Love Language"; they speak the tongue of good country people, showing their love by being useful, direct and gentle.
And that Sharline, she’s obviously a" rules" girl who’d never have to read the book. She is Hoppy’s and yet she is her own, too: wild, adventurous, unstoppable. When someone asks Hoppy where Sharline is, he says, with every reason to believe she’s up to no good, "Damned if I know. That gal has a mind of her own." It’s Hoppy’s job to learn to be Sharline’s "truelove" without trying to suppress what’s fabulous about her, even when she hurts him. He takes to it pretty well, decent and honest as he is.
Sharline and Hoppy are a love story on the grand scale, a potent mix of vulnerability, openness, clear-sightedness and accountability that makes these two, and so many of Harington’s characters, universal and at the same time utterly original.
Harington achieves some hilarious moments when Hoppy watches A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the first time, and it’s magical that, by the time Hoppy starts "talking Shakespeare," the reader knows him so well that he can’t help but be tickled by Hoppy’s take on Lysander’s famous quote "The course of true love never did run smooth." Hoppy reflects that "Any fool knew that to be the truth," having had the maxim proven to him firsthand. These seven or so pages of Hoppy and Sharline discovering Shakespeare are flawless: true to character and perfectly timed, with Harington never making the mistake of confusing ignorant with unintelligent.
The book is sure to satisfy Harington’s readers who can’t get enough of Stay More, Arkansas. One wouldn’t call it "plot-driven"; one would call it" lyrical. "There is not much suspense, or even much tension for the reader beyond wanting to chase down Binns and wondering if Hoppy and Sharline will stay together.
A quibble: The Pitcher Shower’s narrator is never identified, and this allknowing yarn spinner — who, from his language, obviously lives in the Stay More area — is a bit uneven, at times sounding like Hoppy himself, and at other times sounding more proper and distant. Which is not to say that Harington doesn’t use his narrator to delightful effect. There is a moment in those flawless seven pages when the narrator himself starts" talking Shakespeare, "and it’s nothing short of delicious.
And there’s another set of perfect pages, by the way, when the girlfriend’s boyfriend’s girlfriend arrives on the scene. If you plan to read the book, you might as well go ahead and start looking forward to it now.
The Pitcher Shower is slim compared to Harington’s previous tomes. It ends with a preview of coming attractions for Hoppy and Sharline, references to Harington’s earlier books (themselves called" pitcher shows" here), and mentions of some of the more well-known Stay More residents. The reader comes away with the impression that in 2005— 40 years and 13 books since Harington published his first novel — this writer is far from finished exploring the nooks and crannies of the Stay More state of mind. And Harington’s readers will very much hope that he is not through, after romping through this powerful and bawdy meditation on the transcendent powers of love, dreams and pitcher shows. Author shares thoughts on the novel "Nabokov. If you haven’t read Lolita, you must. You must read Pale Fire … any of his great short stories. I think he’s just a fabulous artist and my number one favorite." "James Agee is a much greater writer than Faulkner." "William Styron was my mentor and had tremendous influence on me. I think Styron is a tremendous artist." "Fred Chappell. He writes novels similar to mine but set in the Appalachian Mountains instead of the Ozark Mountains. I think Fred Chappell is probably the greatest novelist of my generation." "There’s a new novel by a young unknown called The Year The Music Changed. It’s a fabulous book. It’s heartbreaking … about the correspondence between a 14-year-old-girl and Elvis Presley … it’ll just blow you away. Diane Thomas is the author."
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online