Jane Springer's Murder Ballad review

Here's the link for another Rumpus review. Because I'm starting to write some book reviews there.

http://therumpus.net/2013/02/murder-ballad-by-jane-springer/

Maybe what doesn't get full voice in the review is this issue I've been having with Southern Literature lately. Like why does it feel like there's this whole tradition of writers who are so tender-hearted about the South, like it was their Uncle, and it was molasses, and it was BFF carved into trees, but in the 1940s, when they would write something else on trees, but you get the idea. So much sentimentality. And it feels like The South makes some writers scared. So they hold it out like it was a trophy they were hoping to win. Look at David Bottoms' Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump. Or Padgett Powell's Edisto. Or that essay in John Jeremiah Sullivan's book Pulphead where he's talking about Andrew Lytle. It's The South wrapped in cellophane. It fascinates me as a topic. And as a style. And as a gesture for soemthing mythic in this land. It has a unique life in American literature (why do we want to prize The South so much? Look to Jennifer Rae Greeson's Our South for some answers). 

For my reading, I prefer Jane Springer's south. And Flannery O'Connor's. And Barry Hannah's. And William Faulkner's. That's lived in. With complicatedness. I prefer literature and life and reality that makes me feel complicated.