A Congress of Wonders

Set around World War II, the three hilarious stories in the collection are linked by the presence of one Philander Cosmo Rexroat, B.S., M.S., "Pee Aitch Dee," resurrected here from McClanahan's bestselling book The Natural Man, where he appeared as "the Cecil B. De Mille of Sex Hygiene Entertainment." In these stories, Rexroat turns up in several new guises: preacher, sideshow spieler, and bogus physician.
"Juanita and the Frog Prince" tells of a pregnant jailhouse laundress whose ill fate is transformed by a magical encounter with Luther "Two-Nose" Jukes, an inmate awaiting trial for murder. The title story walks us down the carnival midway and a step beyond, as the ubiquitous Rexroat, his consort Wanda Pearl, and a clairvoyant hermaphrodite - "It's that old morphadyke again!" - provide the way station for a boy's journey into the grown-up world of love, loss, and hocus-pocus. "Finch's Song," the tale of Needmore's most beleaguered denizen, a school bus driver endlessly tormented by his ruthless half brother, is both a love story and a story of retribution.

A first collection of three long pieces, all set in the 1940s- -``dark and ignorant times'' for the small-town folk that McClanahan (The Natural Man, 1983, etc.) continues to bring to life in his inimitable country-lyrical style. ``Juanita and the Frog Prince,'' the unlikely tale of a ``hoosegow scullery maid'' and a jail inmate with two noses, boldly veers into the fabulistic, with the slutty girl and the freak thug uniting in a weird transmigration of souls. Juanita Pence, knocked up by the ``devious, dissolute, thieving, and mean'' Warren Skidmore Harding, unburdens herself to the toad-ugly Luther ``Two Noses'' Jukes, who's sitting in jail for blowing up Lugnuts Bludgins, another no-count who made fun of Luther's face. As a child, Luther had been sold into sideshow infamy by his crazy mother. On the road, he appeared with the smooth-talking Rev. Philander Cosmo Rexroat, who changed his act from itinerant preacher to freak-show barker. Rexroat's presence links all three stories. ``The Congress of Wonders'' records a day in the life of his sad and seedy sideshow, circa 1944. Mostly ``a pickled-punk show'' of manufactured oddities, its one true attraction is JoJo, a true ``morphadyke,'' who triples as the Bodiless Head and the Bearded Lady. Everyone pays to see the strange hermaphrodite ``pokerate itself,'' but the real wonder is its genuine insight into the future. Finally, in ``Finch's Song: A School Bus Tragedy,'' Rexroat offers his ``Electro-Magno-Static-Diagnosis Machine'' (formerly an electric chair in his sideshow) to diagnose the ailments of Clarence ``Finch'' Fronk, a pitiful and sickly school-bus driver who's tormented by his older half-brother, a bitter and mean pool-hall owner who drives Clarence to a transcendent suicide. McClanahan's old-timey slang and down-home wit endow his trash, drifters, cons, and rubes with poetry and magic. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The reputation of the now seldom read early-nineteenth-century southwestern humorists is for crude and violent comedy: cons and mean-spirited practical jokes played by vicious rednecks on the weak and vulnerable. McClanahan is their inheritor, albeit he infuses a few characterizations with a smidgen of sentiment. The three long stories in this book are set in "Burdock County" in what seems to be western Kentucky during and just after World War II. They are rather like outtakes from Tobacco Road, written with greater comic flair than Erskine Caldwell usually commanded. "Juanita and the Frog Prince" is about a two-nosed murderer and the girl who cleans the jailhouse in which he awaits trial; "The Congress of Wonders" is about a rock-bottom gyp of a freak show and the rubes who fall for it; and "Finch's Song: A School Bus Tragedy" concerns the miserable but happily foreshortened life of a once-pampered invalid who must depend on the brutal graces of his half brother after his mother dies. Funny but sometimes nauseating. Ray Olson