Title: The Walls Came Tumbling Down
Author: Babs H. Deal
Date: 1968
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: none
Length: 312 pages
Quote: “He started throwing brick out behind him. At 11:30 A.M. he found the skeleton of the baby in the wall.”
Today it would be easy to find out who "buried" the dead baby down the unfinished wall during the summer the sorority house was being built: just run a DNA test on the bones and each resident and staff member--assuming that the house was built recently enough that they're still alive--and there you'd be. But this story takes place in 1968.
The rest of the story is about the residents and staff of the sorority house, most of whom are still living in the same Alabama city when the house is pulled down and the skeleton is found, and whether it’s possible to prosecute the case as a murder, and whether it was one. So mainly it’s a sequence of short vignettes showing what’s become of the sorority girls, or what a small city in Alabama was like, in the author’s view, in 1968. We learn who dropped the baby down the wall, and why, in the process of learning how different people grew up and/or grew old.
The characterizations would have to be beyond excellent to suck me into this kind of novel, which they don’t, but the short-short stories are well enough done that I can imagine somebody who loved character studies remembering which character was which and reading this as a novel. If you remember that for some reason the publisher formatted it all wrong, so that instead of skipping a space to indicate a shift to a different story about a different character the author just begins a paragraph with a sentence in italics, you might find it a good read. I didn't; I kept thinking “Joan did what in the kitchen? I thought her name was Clarissa and we were in her car?”--and that distraction factor increased the basic improbability of my feeling sufficiently interested in a dozen different fictional people to remember which one was which through a long series of short-short stories.
Although it’s not the kind of novel I personally happen to like, I found one good thing to say about The Walls Came Tumbling Down. Unlike most fiction set in the Southern States in the early twentieth century, it’s not Southern Gothic, as practiced by Southerners who chose to write about “freaks” to dispel the fears of local readers that the writers were going to blurt out the secrets of local “folks,” and by Northerners who chose for political reasons to overlook the existence of a difference. It’s realistic, with plausible yuppie-type characters. We’re seeing more of that kind of fiction now, thank goodness, but in 1968 it must have struck readers like a cool breeze on a ninety-degree, ninety-percent-humidity afternoon.
What about the Punch-and-Judy scene where the wife hits her husband, really hard, and he hits her back, really hard, and they stay together? I don't like it, but then I don't like this type of novel anyway. For some readers it might be too much of a trigger; for some, not. You decide.
Anyway, so far as is known Deal is still a living author (who can be encouraged, perhaps to do better), so if you buy The Walls Came Tumbling Down here for $5 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment, this web site will do its very best to locate Deal and send $1 to her or a charity of her choice. At least three more books of this size would fit into one $5 package.
No comments:
Post a Comment