Book Review : Soulful Brawler With a Southern Lilt

The Acorn Plan by Tim McLaurin (W. W. Norton: $16.95; 191 pages)

Tim McLaurin catches the tune, but oh, the words.

“The Acorn Plan” starts off with a lovely lilt, a Southern lilt, a what-the-hell backwoods America lilt, the lilt that birds have when the weather’s dry, the soil thin, the prospects poor, but maybe an extra shake after the trill will coax out a reluctant worm, or maybe, even--the shake being exhilarating enough--we can do without worms altogether and subsist on crumbs.

School of Fiction

More schools are opened than do any real teaching, so there’s not much point in going on about a Southeastern-cum-Appalachian school of fiction with bottle-soaked characters, hominy adages and a cracker-barrel, laid-back hindmost-take-the-devil philosophy.

But there are quite a few writers at the game, with the notion that if you can’t literally hoist yourself up by tugging at the back of your own shirt, you may hoodwink gravity for the length of a tall story by employing a gift of the gab on which the Irish half of the Scots-Irish tradition has left its trace.

There is a lively promise in the very first line of “Acorn”:

“Bubble Riley decided to drink all the wine in the world the night Billy cut the soldier’s lung in half.”

Boozing and Brawling

Billy is a fiery, unsettled former Marine who boozes and brawls around East Fayetteville waiting for his future to declare itself. Bubble is his kind, weak uncle, whose future briefly declared itself 20 years earlier--he went to college for two years--and guttered out.

But Bubble, and his sister Ruby--a heart-of-gold, tough-talking and infinitely vulnerable hash-house waitress--dimly want Billy to do better. To get out. To make something of himself.

And so, Bubble’s quixotic project. Billy is in jail for going at the soldier with his knife, but it will be taken as self-defense and he’ll soon be let out. Bubble hasn’t saved himself but he will save Billy by the brute force of example.

He quits his job, cashes in his insurance and settles down to drink himself to death, in the society of the town’s other winos. Billy will be revolted, sobered up; he will cut away, leave town and go to college.

The far-fetched scheme holds a certain storytelling promise, particularly as voiced in the wry local twang that McLaurin gives his characters, and with a line that now and again captures the look and the sense of a scene in the same few words. For example, he describes Bubble lying out in a field along with his fellow drunks. They resemble “autumn leaves a cold wind has plastered against sidewalks and car tops, their colors muted and leached.”

Story Recedes

All too quickly, though, the story recedes into its theme and remains there, for the most part, feebly waving its feet. The theme is the conflicting pulls of a constricting family and small-town tradition, and the urge to get out.

To East Fayetteville, Billy is the brawling hometown champion--the man people buy drinks for and lay bets on, and who can be counted on to uphold a dead-end community’s honor against soldiers and other outsiders. Within the brawler, though, there is an aspiring mind and a childhood passion for astronomy.

There’s also Cassie. She is a stripper in a local bar, but she’s only doing it to earn money to go to New York and study ballet. She and Billy get together. She urges him to find a goal and stick to it, to follow her Acorn Plan. Only one or two acorns ever take hold and grow, she explains, and it seems unfair. But they grow on behalf of the parent tree and all the other acorns that won’t make it.

This is lumpy stuff. Billy, as an acorn standing for the hopes of all the other Fayetteville acorns, is less than invigorating. Even more dead, and longer, is the account of Bubble’s passage from alcoholism-for-a-cause to plain lethal soddenness, and the history of the Riley family’s perpetualdefeats.

Foreman in the Mill

Mike Riley, Billy’s father and a tough and driven man, gets to be foreman in the local mill and stands as his family’s bulwark. But his grim single-mindedness kills him at an early age, and the message for Billy is that ambition can be deadly.

Bubble, whose alcoholic jags keep drowning the book in a flood of cheap wine and self-pity, was bright but weak. He had an affair with Mike’s wife, but it came to nothing, and its narration doesn’t do much for the book. Ruby has been loved and left by a succession of truckers; the latest affair goes on throughout the book and ends, predictably, with the trucker absconding with her savings.

These are leaden histories and heavily worn themes. The speakers’ lilting is not enough to lift them and by the time the story is half-told, the voices have subsided into a discouraged drawl. When Billy makes a hopeful choice, suddenly without much real preparation, it doesn’t really seem to matter.