John Sledge is the author most recently of Southern Bound: A Gulf Coast Journalist on Books, Writers, and Literary Pilgrimages of the Heart. He spent many years as the books editor for the Mobile Press-Register, is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and serves as senior architectural historian for the Mobile Historic Development Commission. He lives in Fairhope, Alabama.
Q: What do you see as the future of book reviewing?
A: It's hard to know for sure how things will settle out.
We're in a period of such tremendous flux and churn that everything's still
sliding around. One of the most promising trends I see though is the emergence
of various literary blogs--the best of them very good indeed--that
have sprung up in recent years. Sites like Bookslut, The Elegant Variation, and of course your
own great site are consistently excellent and incredibly rewarding for
readers. These sites have been much praised and are building respectable
followings.
What I fear may be going from the broader culture for good
is the concept of the literary critic as an authority figure with
a significant reach through national publications. The kind of heyday
enjoyed by the likes of Alfred Kazin and Jonathan Yardley probably won't
come again and that's a pity. There are some great young critics out
there of course--James Wood who regularly appears in the London Review of Books
springs to mind--but their audience is diminished, fragmented and more
distracted than ever. And in the United States in particular, books just don't
seem to matter as much to the population. Plenty of people still read
seriously, but they are trending older and every survey shows their
numbers are in free fall.
Q: One of the sections of your book involves literary
pilgrimages you’ve made. Do you have a particular favorite location?
A: I would have to say Oxford, Mississippi. Not only do you
have the ghost of Willam Faulkner stomping around--his house and burial site
are must-see--but one of the finest book stores in the South--Square Books--is
perched upon the town square. The University of Mississippi features some
lovely architecture as well as the fabled Grove, a ten acre
shaded area popular with tailgaters on football weekends. They're football
mad there of course, it's an SEC school after all, but they also pay attention
to their literary heritage and honor it. The people are incredibly warm and
friendly, and there are some wonderful restaurants. It's unlike any other
Mississippi, or Southern town, and still harbors some good writers like Tom Franklin, Beth Ann Fennelly, and Jack Pendarvis.
Q: You were trained as an architectural historian. Which
books on architectural history have you especially enjoyed reading or reviewing
over the years?
A: I really liked Barksdale Maynard's Architecture in the United States, 1800-1850 for its forceful argument that nineteenth-century American architecture, especially the Greek Revival style, owed far
more to English precedent that has been previously acknowledged.
Enthusiastic interpreters tended to view the American Greek Revival as a robust
declaration of cultural independence from England in the wake of the
Revolution. The belief was that the Greek Revival, harkening back to the
democratic traditions of the ancient Athenians, was viewed as the perfect new
national symbol by the young American Republic. Maynard shows this to have been
mostly fiction. The Americans liked the new style because it was popular in
Europe, and especially England, and they wanted to be in the aesthetic
mainstream.
I also really liked Thomas S. Hines' The Architecture of Yoknapatawpha. Hines, an architectural historian in California, is a
distant Faulkner relative, and his book is the only one I know to really
examine how Faulkner used architecture in his novels. It's a wonderful book,
informative and readable with great photographs that Hines took on his
Mississippi rambles.
Q: Your book is titled Southern Bound. What do you think
makes the Southern literary tradition unique?
A: Well, I don't think it's so distinctive anymore, though
plenty of contemporary Southern novelists are still trying to exploit that
heritage. I guess I'm guilty of that too! We're more like the rest of the
country now, for good and ill. But place still matters here very much.
The next Faulkner won't write like Faulkner, or about the
same things. It's exciting to see some Southern writers grappling with the new
immigrant landscape that's beginning to appear in the region. When I was a kid
growing up in the Birmingham area, we had black folks and white folks. Now
there are growing Hispanic, Indian and Korean communities with their own
traditions, churches and so on. That's ho-hum to people up East and in
California, but other than some urban enclaves like New Orleans, it's utterly
new here. That's the new South crying out for good writers, not the familiar
shacks and mules of yesteryear.
Q: Are you writing another book?
A: Yes, I'm writing a history of the Mobile River, which
flows into Mobile Bay. It's only about 50 miles long, but the larger Mobile
River Basin is one of the larger river systems east of the Mississippi and
drains much of Alabama and a fair chunk of Georgia and Mississippi. My
inspiration is that wonderful "Rivers of America" series published through the middle of the twentieth century. Those volumes are
treasures with great woodcuts and a fine literary tone. I'm under contract with
the University of South Carolina Press.
As time allows, I'm also puttering on a novel, Isolatoes, the name coming from Moby Dick and
Melville's description of the Pequod's crewmen as "isolatoes," or
islands unto themselves. It's based on various eccentric characters I've known
over the years who for one reason or another just didn't fit into the
mainstream too well. It's the only fiction I've done and I find it very
liberating.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I love, love, love Henry James--the middle period, not
the difficult later stuff. They didn't call him the master for nothing. His
literary criticism just sparkles.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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