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Title: Night Rider (Southern Classic Series) by Robert Penn Warren, George Core ISBN: 1-879941-14-7 Publisher: J S Sanders & Co Pub. Date: September, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.90 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (2 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Flawed first novel, but hints of the better work to come...
Comment: Penn Warren ended up with a fine reputation, largely based on "All the King's Men" and poetry and literary criticism and his standing as a "modern" Southerner in the mid-20th century who could explain some of the past sins and virtues of his ancestors and neighbors. This first novel displays promise, but is not a compelling read page-by-page. It improves with each chapter after getting off to a slow start. For my taste, there is excessive Kentucky backwoods dialogue, some uninteresting digressions, and some failure to develop the major characters in ways that make one care deeply about their fates. Percy, the lawyer and main figure, idealistically but with some vanity, jumps into a tobacco growers union which plans to fight the big corporate buyers in order to get a fairer price for the crop. However, little-by-little, the association members begin to become coercive, and then to terrorize, those who won't join. A moral cause has become an immoral enterprise by the end of the book. Lives are taken or ruined, and the acts "justified" because the cause has to be saved due to the energies already invested in it. Meanwhile, Percy commits an act against justice to get a client free of a murder charge, an act against his innocent wife which destroys his marriage, and an act of murder to preserve his cause. He does not seem to know just how he sunk that low, or how to recover. He has an affair after his wife leaves him that seems loveless and even lust-less, yet it leads to tragedy for the father of the girl with whom he sleeps. In some ways the book is a replaying of the lost Confederate cause of the Civil War. I've stated some of its weaknesses, but I must say that I did want to stick it through. I came to care about Percy and wanted to find out how it ended, even though Percy is not fully likeable. There is one earlier review posted on this site, and that writer dissects the novel more skillfully than I can. I agree with his assessment. Worth reading if you have a special interest in Penn Warren, or in Kentucky, or tobacco history, or in how organizations with high-minded goals can be corrupted by forceful leaders or strained circumstances.
Rating: 3
Summary: Sticks with you like resin from tobacco plants
Comment: Though it has now been almost 30 years since I last spent a fall afternoon cutting tobacco, spearing the stalks onto wooden staves, and hanging the staves into the curing barn, I still remember the smell of the plants, the stickiness of the resin, the glint of the cutting and spearing tools. This tenuous link to a much earlier time, the time of the tobacco wars that rocked rural Kentucky and Tennessee just before WWII, provided me with just a sliver of insight to the hard times Robert Penn Warren depicts in his first novel, Night Rider.
The protagonist, Percy Munn, is an affable but pliable young lawyer, happily married with a growing law practice when he is drawn into supporting "The Association," an ardent band of tobacco farmers, including doctors, politicians, and other men whom "Perse" admires and who in turn admire him for his oratory skills, leadership, and status. Percy, himself a tobacco farmer, and the association work to break the economic monopoly exerted by the big tobacco companies (those bastards were evil well before they started lying to the public about the addictive nature of their deadly products). But when legal and ethical means are not enough, the collective leadership starts down a slippery slope of coercing nonassociation members to join or else face the consequences. Bands of "night riders" fan out across countryside, first destroying the crops of those who refused their entreaties to join up, then property, until even the taking of human life is justified as a means to their end once they have made the decision to torch the tobacco warehouses in Bardsville and the other towns in the vicinity.
Percy Munn finds himself at the center, and as other men whom he admired peel off from The Association because their moral bearing will not allow their continued participation, Percy eventually finds himself cut off from his wife; men such as Capt. Todd whom he greatly admired; Lucille Christian, the woman who tries to save him from himself; and eventually the leaders of The Association who let him take a fall for something he did not do.
The story is properly characterized as a tragedy even though Percy Munn is not as noble a central figure as one might expect. His great weakness is that he attaches himself to causes without much thought of the consequences. In other words, he is an idealist, but a flawed one. Though Percy's fall is in part caused by his flaws, a series of betrayals---sometimes he is the betrayer and other times he is betrayed---also conspire against him. When loyalty becomes more a currency than a principal, tragedy is inevitable.
Robert Penn Warren captures the speech and mannerisms of this main characters effectively, but he does not develop three-dimensional characters, with the exception of Willie Proudfit, the hard-scrabble, nearly destitute farmer who is something of a mystic who lives life fully and with a fervor Perse cannot experience as he continues his spiral inward. The landscape and settings seem more like those rendered by wood cuttings rather than a photograph. Some of Robert Penn Warren's digressions meander for pages without bolstering the story, and at times the allegorical and naturalistic elements of the novel seem at war with one another.
If permitted, I might rate this novel three and a half stars. Reading Night Rider is a worthwhile book for wintertime reading, butit is not the finest work by the author who was to become the first Poet Laureate of the United States.
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Title: I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Library of Southern Civilization) by Twelve Southerners, Louis Decimus, Jr. Rubin ISBN: 0807103578 Publisher: Louisiana State University Press Pub. Date: January, 1978 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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