Inman Majors

Swimming in Sky (SMU Press)

Inman Majors, a sixth-generation Tennessean and nephew of famed former UT football coach Johnny Majors, recently claimed a spot on Davis-Kidd’s list of local best-selling fiction with his first novel, Swimming in Sky. Majors’ work is winsome and boyish, even genuinely sweet, on the surface, but there’s an underlying despair—and anger—that afflicts many recent college grads with obscenely expensive educations and no real place to take them—except, in Majors’ novel, as baggage on the occasional acid trip.

This event is only the most dramatic emblem of displacement in Swimming in Sky. Taking dispirited stock of his mother’s garage, protagonist Jason Sayer comments, “It’s always strange when your parents are split up, how you’ll see a glass from the old house at your mother’s new house, and then see another from the same set at your dad’s. Old chipped glasses that you used to drink Kool-Aid out of during the summer. The furniture and glasses just follow you around, reminders, ghosts, from another life.”

Those ghosts seem weirder and ultimately scarier among the New South horrors of Knoxville and Atlanta, both transformed in the last half-century by the concepts of shopping malls and marketing strategies. Which isn’t a reason to demean Majors’ genuine accomplishments by pigeonholing Swimming in Sky as a “slacker novel” (as does its ill-written promo sheet). Majors clearly isn’t interested in pitching to this particular audience, as evidenced by his old-fashioned religious imagery and yearning. More significant still are his references to the New South literary tradition—one that probably had its actual beginning in Faulkner’s tales of disintegrating and deracinated families (including the Compsons, who had some pretty significant members named Jason) and then stepped out on its own with Walker Percy’s tales of youthful male ennui and drift, The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman. Indeed, if Jason Sayer has a true forebear, it’s Percy’s Will Barrett, who wanders out of Percy and into Barry Hannah’s strange, wild energies, detouring perhaps into a little Denis Johnson territory too.

What makes Majors entirely his own writer, however, is not Swimming in Sky’s recurrent notes of cynicism, but its stubbornly old-fashioned self-loathing. Unsettled by what might be flashbacks, or what might be genuinely psychotic paranoia, Sayer’s nerves aren’t soothed or gladdened by the wedding of his mother’s boyfriend’s daughter: “I don’t want to look at the cross, I’m afraid if I look it’s going to come crashing to the floor, so I’m looking across the aisle to see something normal, a kid playing in his seat or an old lady all dressed up, and instead my eyes come to rest on a man with a prosthetic leg. His socks are too short. And I’m looking at his plastic leg, wondering why in the world wouldn’t he buy socks that were long enough, when he turns and smiles and I hold his glance long enough to give him a weak smile back but I’m sure he knows I was looking at his leg. And the organ music begins to sound chintzy or old-fashioned and I’m the kind of person who notices prosthetic legs at weddings.”

Sure, there’s a good bit of humor here, but of the darkest, most self-blasting kind; after all, none of us wants to become a person who notices the kind of things no one should notice at weddings, like the shabbiness of some of the guests, the corners cut on the ceremony’s cost, or the fact that the offspring of families whose relations must be defined with multiple apostrophes have an even higher rate of divorce than their parents, step- and otherwise. In other words, there is genuine sorrow in such passages, and none of it smacks of self-pity. We don’t get the idea that Sayer feels sorry for himself because he is the kind of person who notices prosthetic legs and day-old flower arrangements. Instead, we feel that he hates this part of himself, and we assume that he wishes he were otherwise, and wishes this genuinely and badly enough to try to attempt change.

The self-pitying variety of postmodern self-mortification abounds in the fiction of some of Majors’ contemporaries, who seem more interested in convincing us of their sensitivity and inner anguish than they do in engaging with the ruthless, unsparing self-scrutiny that Majors demands of Jason Sayer. Sayer’s self-loathing is active, the beginning of a process that leads toward attempts at redemption and change. But too often, current fiction writers bask passively in their inwardly directed torment, satisfied with merely having had the emotion—the title story from Rick Moody’s recent collection Demonology being a perfect example.

In vino veritas

Family and social dynamics are often the subtexts of Jay McInerney’s “Uncorked” wine columns for House and Garden, recently collected in Bacchus and Me (Lyons Press). Sure, the one-liners are great—it’s hilarious, and slightly embarrassing, for folks of a certain age to recall that straw-covered Chianti bottles really were the “bong component of choice in dorm rooms around the world.” But the body, if not the bouquet, of McInerney’s subject matter in these columns comes from the blend of charming self-deprecation and occasionally stark, psychologically astute self-loathing—worth mentioning here, as with Majors’ Swimming in Sky, because grandstanding gestures of self-abasement have become ubiquitous to the point of meaninglessness in contemporary American writing. The real thing, as McInerney knows, requires a bitter, mucky swallow.

Not that Bacchus and Me consists of mini-sermons on sauterne and the soul. And yet for most Americans who belong, roughly speaking, to McInerney’s generation, there’s just enough biblical literacy afloat in our collective unconscious to make us connect wine with the New Testament’s Last Supper—even if that connection results only from reading an author like Hemingway, for whom shared meals and wine represent one of the few genuine sacraments possible for modern culture.

Hemingway’s list also includes war, sex, and hard-ass self-questioning, especially as pertains to the domestic crucible—and the last of these, of course, figures into Bacchus and Me. For example, when families gather on emotionally loaded occasions such as Thanksgiving, McInerney suggests that a little knowledge about wine can lead to definite improvement over past hard-liquor-kindled conflagrations. Champagne encourages not truculence, he says, but a sense of celebration, and gewürztraminer and zinfandel can also be fun, though McInerney won’t pretend to grant legitimacy to pink and white varieties of the latter, or that he likes Beaujolais Nouveau (“the liquid equivalent of yams with lots of marshmallows on top”).

And how much should one allow for each person? “Judge thyself; others thou shalt not judge” might well have been the author’s motto here, since he reminds us that no matter what we “choose to wash our turkey down with...if you hear yourself whining that your parents loved your brother more than they did you, you’ve probably consumed too much.”