I’d like to know what music Xan Brooks listened to while working on his sure-footed second novel, steeped as it is in the musical traditions of the American south. If any of the following mean something, then it’s likely you will find enjoyment in The Catchers: Harry Smith, John Fahy, Dust-to-Digital, Mama Thornton, Alan Lomax.
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It is easy to discern his writing influences: Faulkner, Welty, Thomas Wolfe, McCullers, Twain, etc; writers intrinsically linked to the grandeur and gothic shadings of that part of the United States. Standing in such huge shadows can be a blessing and a curse, of course: it can provide coolness of thought to bring clarity of style, syntax and structure. But it can also be hard for a writer to step out, to set aside the vade mecum and move into their own light, and here lies both the strength and weakness of The Catchers.
It’s smartly told, featuring fine period details and solid dialogue. And yet the main characters, and the bit players around them, never truly lift off the page. One wants it all to sing in Brooks’s voice, but it feels like an affectionate tribute act to the writers mentioned.
It’s 1927, and we’re witnessing the birth of popular music through field recordings made by ‘”catchers” travelling across the country, offering 30 bucks a pop for a song recording (then owned in perpetuity by the record label). Enter “Irish” John Coughlin, who’s sent to Appalachia, searching for the song that sets a finder up for life.
He hears about a young black musician and hooch runner named Moss Evans, whose idiomatic musical style creates a myth of his exploding bullfrogs around the Mississippi Delta. Coughlin sets out to find him, even with flood threatening the levee, and you feel the biblical foreboding instantly; there’s a lot of weather, way too much weather.
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The storied American south will do things to a modern writer: it’ll bring out scriptural symbolism (dead pigs in the waters; a hotel manager “tending his flock”); conjure characters named Bucky Garner, and reverence for old colonels with high-blooded horses. There is nothing wrong with this fundamentally, except it is hard to nail and has been done before. Brooks is a good, clean writer. But if you love southern American literature, you will feel you have been down this road of magical Mississippi mud before, and with better clutch control.
NJ McGarrigle is a critic
