Set in southern Louisiana in the weeks preceding the great flood of 1927, this novel depicts a place and way of life about to be forever changed. On the verge of manhood and a stone’s throw of the rising Mississippi River, Louis Proby is pulled between his love of the natural world and the glittering temptations of New Orleans, between the beautiful Nanette Lançon and a father who no longer seems larger-than-life, between the simplicity of childhood and the complicated decisions of adulthood.
Louis comes of age at a time when the country is coming of age. In Louisiana, it’s a time when the powerful prove themselves willing to sacrifice the poor to protect their position. As the people of Cypress Parish go about their daily lives, bankers in New Orleans are plotting to alter those lives irrevocably. Like so many calamities, the one that befalls Cypress Parish has both natural and human causes.
Based on historical events and narrated on the eve of another disaster, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish tells the story of a young man growing up in a time and place not quite like any other.
When Katrina struck Louisiana in 2005, Elise Blackwell was deep into a novel about the flood that struck Louisiana in 1927. "This still spooks me," she says, and that uncanny repetition of disaster forced her to revise what she'd written. Though it makes no explicit reference to contemporary politics, her novel inspires plenty of unsettling reflection on the moral failure of leaders who can remove themselves from the lives they destroy.
The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish opens when Louis Proby is an old man and his neighbors are boarding up their houses in preparation for Katrina, "on the eve of what the newscasters say will be more devastation by water." Too old to run or panic, Louis decides instead to tell us about the year he turned 17, water swept away his county, and he learned sobering truths about adulthood. That may seem unnaturally composed in the face of a hurricane, but Louis is a very cool narrator, indeed.
His father was a lumberman who rose to town supervisor through a mixture of hard work and treachery. In the first chapter, young Louis sees his father respond to a disgruntled employee by smashing his skull with the blade of a shovel. It's a shocking scene, but awfully early for what turns out to be the novel's most dramatic moment.
The chapters that follow are surprisingly dilatory. Louis describes his pleasant family life, protected on all sides by his father's tight control of the town and his shady dealings with politicians and gangsters in New Orleans. His sister has a strange mental handicap that provides just the right touch of Tennessee Williams gothic. A boy in town is taken away to a leper colony (the local armadillos are carriers). Louis, meanwhile, gets a job as a driver for a hotshot businessman who introduces him to racy clubs, exotic women and power barons who bargain with others' lives.
Blackwell writes about the violent confluence of men and nature, but all these characters and incidents come to us with careful, dispassionate precision. Louis is a student of natural history -- he's fascinated by Pliny's classical Historia Naturalis -- and he describes moments of corruption and passion the way a good scientist might detail a snake shedding its skin.
Sensitive and beautiful, yes, but muted and restrained almost beyond belief. Louis loses his virginity with about as much excitement as I might lose a hand of solitaire. On a grander scale, the flood waters rise ominously all though the story, but at almost every opportunity for drama -- including even the climactic destruction of Cypress Parish itself -- the action is muted and submerged. We're meant to feel the intense effect of these events on Louis, but it's all portrayed with excessive subtlety.
"An old man may remember the facts of his youth," Louis tells us, "but he cannot always remember what they felt like." Fair enough, but too often the absence of feeling here seems self-conscious -- the passive aggression of a "soft talker" -- and that pose drains the story of the force it might have exerted.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
On the eve of Hurricane Katrina, the now elderly narrator, Louis Proby, remembers the great floods of his small Louisiana town in 1927, recounting an intimate, resonant history of the era of Huey Long and Marcus Garvey. Louis, 17, is the son of Cypress Parish's superintendent, William Proby, who ascended the local logging ranks and regularly has to compromise himself in deals with the hardscrabble laborers and casinos in order to keep order in the town, as Louis painfully witnesses. Louis is a dutiful son, smitten with a pretty girl from a French family, Nanette Lançon, and intent on becoming a doctor, as per his father's plans. Offered the job of driving lumber company official Charles Segrist to and from New Orleans, Louis is granted entrée into the grand seedy clubs of the Crescent City and learns a little not just about prostitutes, alcohol and back deals with Isleños bootleggers Olivier Menard and Orlando Funes, but also of plans to blow up a Cypress Parish levee and thus flood the area in order to save New Orleans. Blackwell (
Hunger) elegantly chronicles Louis's conflict between protecting his first love and his obligations to his father, though Louis finds he betrays both.
(Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
On the eve of Hurricane Katrina, 90-year-old scientist Louis Proby sits in his New Orleans apartment and remembers the defining moment of his young adulthood--the 1927 flood that wiped out his hometown, Cypress Parish, Louisiana. In spare and telling detail, he recalls his first love, French immigrant Nanette Lancon; his uneducated but cunning father's rise to camp foreman on a logging crew; and his job as chauffeur for the region's most powerful politician, who gives him a hard-nosed lesson in power politics. Louis' more personal memories are interspersed with informational background on the construction of the levees, race relations, and a nearby leper colony. In the novel's denouement, Louis sits in on the meeting where the city fathers decide to intentionally dynamite the levees and flood Cypress Parish in an ill-advised bid to save New Orleans from damage. Blackwell (
Hunger, 2003) ably evokes an earlier time and keeps the tone deliberately low-key throughout, which, in some ways, only serves to underscore all that was sacrificed that day. Timely reading from a thoughtful, subtle writer.
Joanne WilkinsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
