Hell at the Breech

By Tom Franklin (William Morrow, 336 pp., $23.95)

Franklin appears 6 p.m. June 17 at Davis-Kidd Booksellers

Until he became a novelist, Tom Franklin’s favorite job was working the graveyard shift at a sandblasting-grit factory outside Mobile. As one of the few employees there late at night, he did everything, from shoveling piles of grit “as big as Volkswagens, to driving the front-end loader and even running the plant,” he recalls wistfully. The work was a no-brainer, and it afforded him ample time to read and think about stories—helpful to his daytime life as an English student at the University of Southern Alabama. But even better, working at the plant provided firsthand knowledge of what Franklin calls the industrial, “ruined South,” and it’s this insight that makes his short stories and new novel such compelling reads.

“I’m very interested in the juxtaposition of new and old,” he says. “The forever-old banks of a river with this 40-year-old chemical plant that has changed the river in that short of a time, in the blink of a blink of the river’s eye, in a second in the river’s lifetime. It’s suddenly been contaminated by us, by the shortsightedness of us.”

Never mind that Franklin’s novel, Hell at the Breech, is set in 1898, or that its main characters are bootleggers, bandits and an aging sheriff. The themes it evokes—the clashes between urban and rural life, between tradition and capitalism, between man and nature—are as relevant today as they were a century ago. “Everything has significance to other times,” he says of the book, which revolves around a bloody, real-life feud between townspeople and a country gang. “I think people are pretty much the same now as then.”

The slow degradation of the Old South is a story that Franklin knows well. Like his friend and fellow novelist William Gay, Franklin grew up in a small Southern town, in his case Dickinson, Ala. With just over 300 people, a post office and two churches, the town and its surroundings inspired many of the stories in his first book, Poachers, and a much antedated version is the basis for the hamlet of Mitcham Beat, the center of the action in Hell at the Breech. “It’s one of those places in the South that’s dying a really slow and ugly death,” the author says of his hometown. “Now there are drugs there, a lot of people have moved, the store is shut down.”

Drugs may be relatively new to the South, but violence—in particular violence born of desperation, of hard, biting poverty—has always been background scenery. And for Franklin, like many other Southern writers, it is an inescapable part of his writing. “In a way we are the great sinners,” he says. “We were the worst sinners of all, and we clung to it, and then we got it yanked from us and then we’re bitter, and still are bitter, and coming around and accepting too readily the outside world.”

In Poachers, virtually every story revolves around violent, angry characters who have just lost their last hope, often driven over the edge by money or work, by the outside world forcing itself into a way of life so long ensconced in its own kudzu-draped reality. In “Grit,” the protagonist—who works at a grit mill—falls into a plot with a local criminal to scam the factory’s Northern owners, but the plan soon spins out of control. “I’m obsessed and fascinated with [violence] myself,” Franklin says. “I fear it; the few violent encounters I’ve had terrified me. I want to try in a way to understand it. So I write about people who are sometimes at ease with these things, or they get pulled in and seduced or destroyed by it, or both.”

The violent physicality of Southern culture is also what drove Franklin, a self-described oddball who as a child eschewed hunting and sports for novels and comics books, to leave Southern Alabama soon after receiving his master’s degree in English in 1995. Following a yearlong teaching stint in Selma, he began a master’s in creative writing at the University of Arkansas, one of the top programs in the country. There he met his future wife, Beth Ann Fennelly, and completed most of the stories in Poachers. “I was writing great sentences without any structure to them, didn’t know how they were stories. Just 12 pages of pretty sentences,” he says. “And at Arkansas they were very much about plot. And they got me right away as a lyrical bullshit-sentence writer and they hammered plot into me.”

Fortunately for readers, Franklin has managed to hang on to some of his lyrical style while still being able to tell a gripping story. Hell at the Breech is a brutal novel, but it’s also shot through with beautiful, almost poetic images of back roads and hidden streams, as in the following passage: “Once out of the thicket, though, the land grew pretty to Waite’s eye: field beyond field beyond field of well-kept cotton, each tuft white as a senator’s eyebrow. Between the fields there were less level, unplantable spaces, lush deep wooded ravines with sprawling water oaks in the bottoms and hollows crowded with pine and other evergreens, limbs hung with Spanish moss, ivy, wisteria, and honeysuckle, creeks where cool water smoothed the surfaces of wide white rocks.”

Fans of William Gay will hear a stout echo of the Howenwald native in Franklin’s prose. The two writers share an angst about the direction the rural South is headed, and they express it by juxtaposing nature and violence, the past and the present. Both Hell at the Breech and Gay’s Provinces of Night overflow with images of light and dark, with light often linked to symbols of progress and modern ideas. But progress doesn’t always equal moral superiority. In Hell at the Breech, the townspeople, who come from the airy, relatively cosmopolitan Coffeeville, prove themselves capable of hideous violence, worse than anything committed by the supposedly backward rural folk of Mitcham Beat.

Not surprisingly, both authors say they were heavily influenced by Cormac McCarthy, whose work is widely credited with jump-starting interest in the current generation of Southern writers. Gay modeled his first novel, The Long Home, on McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper, and Franklin says he found great inspiration in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. “I loved the idea of rugged landscape and men on horses and violence,” he says. “I got seduced by his language and the ideas there.”

After several years of moving around the country on teaching fellowships—including a semester at the University of Pennsylvania—Franklin and Fennelly have settled in Oxford, Miss., where she has a tenure-track position in the English department at Ole Miss. Franklin spends much of his time commuting to Sewanee, where he holds yet another fellowship, and working on his next novel. In the meantime, he enjoys getting to know Oxford, a hub of the Southern literary world. “I live on the same street with [fellow authors] Barry Hannah and Larry Brown,” he says, “and right around the corner, almost a quarter of a mile, is William Faulkner’s house. It’s a great Southern place. But in a way it’s frozen. There’s still the Ole Miss Rebels, and they have that flag, and they still play 'Dixie’ at football games. It’s a jazzed up, hope-you’ll-forget-it’s-'Dixie’ version, but in a way this place is frozen, so the good is here and so is the bad.”