| CHANGE has come to Tula Springs, La. Readers familiar with St. Jude Parish from James Wilcox's first novel, "Modern Baptists" (1983), may have trouble recognizing the place today. There's a Starbucks in the Piggly Wiggly. The Sonny Boy Bargain Store, rechristened Redds, is now part of the BurgerMat empire. Romance unfolds in chat rooms, and Viagra-touting spam finds at least one willing customer. The globalized marketplace has pressed its thumb on Tula Springs, uncorking a plethora of brands including Vera Wang, Armani, Dolce & Gabbana and Christian Louboutin. We've come a long way from the Ajax Feed and Seed and bourbon and Tabs at Juniors. For all the surface changes, however, some things remain very much the same, notably the unrequited love of Burma Van Buren (née LaSteele) for her former boss and onetime Sonny Boy's assistant manager, the feckless Bobby Pickens. In the appealing, generous and energetic "Hunk City," Wilcox, the director of Louisiana State University's creative writing program, returns to the characters from the first of his Tula Springs novels to see how they're making out in these perilous times. For starters, Burma can actually afford the influx of designer brands. She's sitting on $36,497,682.47 of her late husband's lottery winnings and owns Graceland II, his "replica of Elvis's house, only much bigger." You'd think all this would bring a woman some happiness, but Burma still toils at Redds, driven by "loyalty and duty" even as she fights lawsuits from thwarted heirs and tries to dispense her fortune in accordante with her best do-gooder impulses. Unfortunately, partisan politics have also arrived in Tula Springs, and the resulting red/ blue divide has made it hard for Burma to exercise her charity. Everyone wants a piece of her fortune, but her proposed donations (to largely liberal causes) are met with a combination of anonymous threats to neuter her dog, intentional mishandling by her Republican accountant and the invariable exposure of her recipients' hidden agendas. (A contribution for the food pantry is called "hush money" to be used by the Vatican.) Into this simmering brew steps a Mysterious Stranger. The handsome Dr. Schine - he's the "hunk" of the title - shows up to landscape Graceland II and reveals himself to be an anti-growth-hormone activist. It's hard to tell what captivates Burma more: his assurances that his work will help save the rain forests or her attraction to his "lean and tall and chiseled" body. This attraction is in itself surprising, given that "Mr. Pickens's pale washed-up physique, topped by a bland, indistinct nose, was what got her juices flowing." Schine exerts a similar pull on the other ladies of Tula Springs, ingratiating himself with Donna Lee Kelly, a lawyer who, since her apprentice days in "Modern Baptists," has opened her own practice, and with Burma's shrewish mother. Schine ultimately reveals he's an academic on assignment; he wants to "redefine the concept of legally blind" so that it refers to "workers who guaranteed themselves a worse life by subsidizing incredible wealth." Schine's stay sets off a series of epiphanies among those who embrace him until, in the best Mysterious Stranger tradition, he skips town, leaving minor miracles and changed lives in his wake. In Wilcox's Christian parish of saints and sinners, Schine - whose very name evokes The Light - brings to mind another mysterious stranger who, embraced by a few disciples, mistrusted by others, worked some miracles and departed. As in his prior novels, Wilcox's narrative, which skitters like a stone thrown expertly across a country pond, delivers a high quotient of whimsy - Pickens's assistant supplements his income by making office visits to floss his customers' teeth. Wilcox's books are full of flourishes like this, and they won't be to every reader's taste, especially those with a low threshold for quirkiness. His work is so crammed with complications - some subplots have subplots - that it's occasionally hard to know what matters. But Wilcox has always been about more than broad comedy. His men and women, though often clownish, are rarely cartoonish. He has a Dickensian knack for animating minor characters and an eye for the telling detail. "Though he was barely 23," Wilcox writes of the professional flosser, "Edsell's lantern jaw and narrow-set eyes gave him the spry, wizened look of an octogenarian." Here in Barcalounger country, startled by a bit of unpleasant news, Pickens "pulled a lever and sat upright." Burma's mother, an especially memorable creation, invests "lavishly in a Chinese wardrobe not just to encourage capitalism in that bastion of godless Communism, but also because the high collars hid the scar from her goiter operation." The novel's beating heart, however, is poor Burma and her perpetually thwarted desires. Ever the appealing mixture of high and low - she snaps a rubber band on her wrist one moment and poses like "Jane Eaglen's Brünnhilde on the DVD overdue at the parish library" the next - Burma embodies Wilcox's notions about the difficulty of simply doing good in a world of competing interests, and she learns her own lesson from the mysterious Dr. Schine about how it may be possible. Beholding her beloved, vaguely transformed Pickens, Burma is moved to observe: "Bobby, there's a little bit of Jesus in everyone, isn't there?" Things are changing in Wilcox's latest Tula Springs book. There's a Starbucks in the Piggly Wiggly. Mark Sarvas runs The Elegant Variation, a literary blog. His first novel will be published next year. |
