ARKANSAS ADIOS.
By Earl Mac Ruad'7l. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.
178 pp. $3.50.Arkansas Adios is a modern-day, red-clay version of Penrod Jashber. Rural Arkansas in 1970 is a long way from Indiana m Still the characters in these two novels are similar in kind. Eleven-year-old becomes Lester Long. "Full-blooded" Duke is now called Cartoon Dog. Penrod's sweetheart Marjorie turns into Sharleen. His sister Margaret and her two boyfriends Herbert Hamilton Dade and Robert Williams appear as Bolivia with Roland and Joe. Even better Penrod's sawdust-box sanctuary is now a 1957 De Soto with pushbutton drive.
It's hard to keep a good boy down. Like his literary daddy, Tom Sawyer, Penrod's imagination frees him from the conventionbound world of his parents. Fancy creates Harold Ramorez, George B. Jashber, and starts Penrod sailing through strange seas of thought. Without fancy, a boy's world is grim. Powerful forces in the form of parents or school try to imprison youthful spontaneity. But with imagination, the all-boy boy never fails to dynamite the jail.
Compared to Penrod's middle-class paradise, Lester Long's world is a fallen Eden. Lester's mother is insane. His sister Bolivia has an illegitimate child. One of her suitors is a schizophrenic drug-freak, the other a rake-hell bartender. Cartoon Dog is an expert at leaving his calling card on chairs and in the baby's crib. Honey-eyed Sharleen is a sweet flower of the dawn, strolling down country roads with city salesmen.
From a hard-nosed, realistic point of view this is all pretty sordid. Not from Lester's. Because he has imagination, Lester can escape from the cesspool at the end of the street, his mother in bed with a deputy sheriff, and Cartoon Dog's being gassed in the pound. Surrounded by horror, Lester remains innocent. He is a boy.
Arkansas Adios is surprisingly good. The southern grotesque is a type described by authors ranging from Faulkner to Caldwell. Earl Mac Rauch uses his characters to examine man's relationship to reality. Rightly, he concludes that without dreams, life is impossible. The early Christians dreamed heaven. Bolivia imagines herself as a homecoming queen. In his De Soto, Lester is a kaleidoscopic hero, changing his role as the world around him shatters.
If you are a Puritan, stay away from Arkansas Adios. But if you can put Up with briars and a black snake or two, you'll find some sweet blackberries in this novel Penrod's world has changed and he's dirtier. But he'll always be one of the immortals
Dartmouth Assistant Professor of EnglishMr. Pickering is a specialist in 20th CenturyAmerican and English Victorian novels
