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Jujitsu for Christ
Roger Wing, an eighteen-year-old Southern Baptist, opens a jujitsu studio in Jackson, Mississippi in 1960 and, befriended by a neighboring Black family, becomes involved in the Civil Rights movement
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
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148 people want to read
About the author
Jack Butler
57 books10 followersFrom encyclopediaofarkansas.net:
Jack Armand Butler Jr. is a poet and novelist known for structurally experimental writing, usually dealing with the development of a religious self-awareness transcending orthodox views. His work is often sexually charged and humorous.
Jack Butler was born May 8, 1944, in Alligator, Mississippi, to Jack Butler, a Baptist preacher, and Dorothy Butler, a homemaker. He attended high school in Clinton, Mississippi. He was ordained a Baptist minister in Sedalia, Missouri, in 1965, and pastored the Bethlehem Baptist Church briefly in 1966. He received a BS in math and a BA in English from Central Missouri State College (now Central Missouri State University) in 1966. That year, he married Lynnice McDonald, with whom he had two children, Lynnika and Sarah; they divorced in 1977. He earned an MFA from the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1979. In 1983, he married Little Rock (Pulaski County) native Jayme Thomas Tull, a purchasing manager, and became stepfather to her two daughters. They divorced in 2004.
Butler has won several awards, including one from the Boatwright Literary Festival in 1971 for his story, “Voices.” He won first prize for fiction from Black Warrior Review in 1978 for “Without Any Ears” and in 1981 for “A Country Girl.”
Butler has written eight books, including three novels, a short story collection, a recipe collection, and two poetry collections, West of Hollywood: Poems from a Hermitage (August House, 1980) and The Kid Who Wanted to be a Spaceman (August House, 1984). His poetry has been published in several anthologies, including Best Poems of 1976, edited by Joyce Carol Oates; Ozark, Ozark, edited by Miller Williams; and Arkansas Voices. His poems have been published in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, and New Orleans Review.
Butler’s first novel, Jujitsu for Christ (August House, 1986), told the racially charged story of a young man who opens a martial arts school in a predominantly black area in Jackson, Mississippi. Nightshade, a science fiction novel, followed in 1989 from Atlantic Monthly Press. His next book, Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock (Knopf, 1993), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It tells the story of a lawyer, Charles Morrison, whose wife, Lianne, is a former Miss Little Rock. Ostensibly a love story, the novel also captures a portrait of Little Rock and Arkansas. It uses collage, newspaper excerpts, cartoon reprints, and unusual arrangements of dialogue. It features an omniscient narrator who claims to be either the Holy Ghost or perhaps Lianne’s deceased dog to tell the love story that becomes a murder mystery. The novel received national notice for its unconventional style and helped Butler rise from the ranks of regional writer.
In 1997, Algonquin Books published a cookbook, Jack’s Skillet: Plain Talk from a Guy in the Kitchen, and in 1998, Knopf published Dreamer, a novel about dream research and set in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Butler was a writer in residence for the Joint Educational Consortium in Arkadelphia (Clark County) from 1974 to 1977; an English instructor at UA from 1977 to 1979; a science writer and public relations director for the Cancer Cooperative Group of Northwest Arkansas from 1979 to 1980; an actuarial analyst for Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Arkansas in Little Rock from 1980 to 1983; and a rate analyst at the Arkansas Public Service Commission until 1988. He became an assistant dean at Hendrix College in Conway (Faulkner County) in 1988 but left Hendrix in 1993 to be co-director of the Creative Writing Program and an associate professor of creative writing at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. He retired in 2004 for health reasons and now lives in Wyandotte, Oklahoma.
Jack Armand Butler Jr. is a poet and novelist known for structurally experimental writing, usually dealing with the development of a religious self-awareness transcending orthodox views. His work is often sexually charged and humorous.
Jack Butler was born May 8, 1944, in Alligator, Mississippi, to Jack Butler, a Baptist preacher, and Dorothy Butler, a homemaker. He attended high school in Clinton, Mississippi. He was ordained a Baptist minister in Sedalia, Missouri, in 1965, and pastored the Bethlehem Baptist Church briefly in 1966. He received a BS in math and a BA in English from Central Missouri State College (now Central Missouri State University) in 1966. That year, he married Lynnice McDonald, with whom he had two children, Lynnika and Sarah; they divorced in 1977. He earned an MFA from the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1979. In 1983, he married Little Rock (Pulaski County) native Jayme Thomas Tull, a purchasing manager, and became stepfather to her two daughters. They divorced in 2004.
Butler has won several awards, including one from the Boatwright Literary Festival in 1971 for his story, “Voices.” He won first prize for fiction from Black Warrior Review in 1978 for “Without Any Ears” and in 1981 for “A Country Girl.”
Butler has written eight books, including three novels, a short story collection, a recipe collection, and two poetry collections, West of Hollywood: Poems from a Hermitage (August House, 1980) and The Kid Who Wanted to be a Spaceman (August House, 1984). His poetry has been published in several anthologies, including Best Poems of 1976, edited by Joyce Carol Oates; Ozark, Ozark, edited by Miller Williams; and Arkansas Voices. His poems have been published in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, and New Orleans Review.
Butler’s first novel, Jujitsu for Christ (August House, 1986), told the racially charged story of a young man who opens a martial arts school in a predominantly black area in Jackson, Mississippi. Nightshade, a science fiction novel, followed in 1989 from Atlantic Monthly Press. His next book, Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock (Knopf, 1993), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It tells the story of a lawyer, Charles Morrison, whose wife, Lianne, is a former Miss Little Rock. Ostensibly a love story, the novel also captures a portrait of Little Rock and Arkansas. It uses collage, newspaper excerpts, cartoon reprints, and unusual arrangements of dialogue. It features an omniscient narrator who claims to be either the Holy Ghost or perhaps Lianne’s deceased dog to tell the love story that becomes a murder mystery. The novel received national notice for its unconventional style and helped Butler rise from the ranks of regional writer.
In 1997, Algonquin Books published a cookbook, Jack’s Skillet: Plain Talk from a Guy in the Kitchen, and in 1998, Knopf published Dreamer, a novel about dream research and set in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Butler was a writer in residence for the Joint Educational Consortium in Arkadelphia (Clark County) from 1974 to 1977; an English instructor at UA from 1977 to 1979; a science writer and public relations director for the Cancer Cooperative Group of Northwest Arkansas from 1979 to 1980; an actuarial analyst for Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Arkansas in Little Rock from 1980 to 1983; and a rate analyst at the Arkansas Public Service Commission until 1988. He became an assistant dean at Hendrix College in Conway (Faulkner County) in 1988 but left Hendrix in 1993 to be co-director of the Creative Writing Program and an associate professor of creative writing at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. He retired in 2004 for health reasons and now lives in Wyandotte, Oklahoma.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
November 24, 2015
This book wants to be 'Wolf Whistle' by Lewis Nordan or something great written by Barry Hannah. It unfortunately falls short of that with a frenetic and unhinged style. Mildly humorous and occasionally philosophical it has its moments. The back cover best describes it: "Roger Wing, an adolescent martial arts expert, has pledged his talent to the service of Jesus Christ. Setting up shop in an abandoned laundromat on the wrong side of town (Jackson, Mississippi),Roger spreads the Word to a few select, enthusiastic pupils. At the same time he develops a close relationship with the black family living down the street. As business dies down and the temperature soars during Mississippi's civil rights conflict, Roger finds a greater demand for his own brand of preaching. Fighting the temptations that threaten his faith--boredom, depression, and ever-present lust-- and caught in the middle of an unholy racial war, Roger struggles to deliver his message and to be heard." Reading this more than anything made me curious as to who Jack Butler is. Born in Alligator Mississippi in 1944, the son of a Baptist minister, he also became an ordained minister. He held degrees in english, writing, and mathematics. He was a Pulitzer nominee for a later novel. He is described as "a poet and novelist known for structurally experimental writing, usually dealing with the development of a religious self-awareness transcending orthodox views. His work is often sexually charged and humorous." Interesting at best, my curiosity is satisfied.
September 23, 2019
Describing events around 25 years before it was published in 1986, read by me 25 years later in 2011, Jujitsu for Christ is an incredible book that treads some terrifically dangerous ground. As I was reading the first few chapters and realizing what a wonderful, insightful, jaundiced, and wry piece of writing this is, I had to wonder why I had never heard of it before. The author knows like the back of his hand the way the relationship between church and believer works in the South and the cant and cadences used to express it. The endpaper tells us Mr. Butler was raised in Alligator, Mississippi, the son of a Baptist preacher, so there's every reason in the world he should. Then there's the peculiarity that our schoolboy narrator is no less attuned to the thought and discipline of Jujitsu, and with these two philosophies careening together, we have all we need for a morality play of depth and poignancy and, since he seems to want it that way, a lot of telling humor.
But then we get to the race relations part of the story, and somehow the author seems to know all about that epic of tension in American, too, and just where we were poised in the early 1960s, and now we get other narrators, not only the naive white schoolboy but a wide array of black characters making themselves known and the author's asides to illuminate the boneheaded Southern prejudices as well. So this is getting a little scary, and a little too candid and a little too brutal to be able to talk about in your English literature classes. Of course that never kept Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man out of college, and in fact the writer seems to have guessed that I'll be pondering this and at one point has his narrator bemusedly pull a copy of Ellison's book off the shelf just to let me know.
And then we get to the parts about how kids in the 1960s ever managed to approach sex, back in the days before we had porn on TV and the internet all the time and it was an oblique canter of uncertainty and bridled passion and the blind leading the blind -- and we know then that this is never a book you could hand to a friend and say here, you ought to read this. It's just too excruciatingly personal! Somebody could put it all in a movie now and we'd watch it without blinking. But in a book in 1986 it's over the top.
Even in 2011 there's no single individual I can think of to whom I could recommend this fantastic, funny, calamitously truthful novel. That's the reason I'm not giving it five stars. It's too searing to share. I'm amazed it could even be written.
But then we get to the race relations part of the story, and somehow the author seems to know all about that epic of tension in American, too, and just where we were poised in the early 1960s, and now we get other narrators, not only the naive white schoolboy but a wide array of black characters making themselves known and the author's asides to illuminate the boneheaded Southern prejudices as well. So this is getting a little scary, and a little too candid and a little too brutal to be able to talk about in your English literature classes. Of course that never kept Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man out of college, and in fact the writer seems to have guessed that I'll be pondering this and at one point has his narrator bemusedly pull a copy of Ellison's book off the shelf just to let me know.
And then we get to the parts about how kids in the 1960s ever managed to approach sex, back in the days before we had porn on TV and the internet all the time and it was an oblique canter of uncertainty and bridled passion and the blind leading the blind -- and we know then that this is never a book you could hand to a friend and say here, you ought to read this. It's just too excruciatingly personal! Somebody could put it all in a movie now and we'd watch it without blinking. But in a book in 1986 it's over the top.
Even in 2011 there's no single individual I can think of to whom I could recommend this fantastic, funny, calamitously truthful novel. That's the reason I'm not giving it five stars. It's too searing to share. I'm amazed it could even be written.
September 11, 2012
I was still formulating my thoughts about this unique, undersung loner among Novels 'Bout the South, just as the structure itself appeared to be consciously unravelling at the close of Jujitsu for Christ. It speaks nakedly about racist horror and the choking bear hug of faith as well as any great southern novel. The specter of civilization on the collapse hangs in the air, but plenty of writers can do this.
The different thing that Jack Butler executes here is a move like jujitsu instructor Roger Wing does in his ghetto studio - not a sucker punch or a constant wailing, but a deftly placed kick when you, the reader, go on the attack of the story. Jujitsu for Christ does not attack your senses the way hooligans in Harry Crews' books do, no does it methodically hunt you like a Cormac McCarthy anti-protagonist. Butler places just the right hit to the chest cavity required to leave you on the floor, momentarily hollowed by the blow, waiting for the air to come back.
The Freedom Fighters are descending on Mississippi as low boil teen romances and personality crises erupt, all things bent on redefining what seems to be the inevitable, the persistent. Mirroring that, a metafictional aspect creeps up through the novel, coming to a throbbing head in the "Mississippi Vortex Fever" chapter, a magnificent Revelation in the Biblical, contextual and narrative sense. It's one of Joyce's 100-letter thunderclaps from Finnegans Wake manifested as a cloud of gnats hanging in the humidity. I can see where this hallucinatory poetics would lose readers; I got lost in it, but then I like being lost.
The metafiction is to the novel as the participatory horror/joyousness of the South is to the people that live here. The unraveling of our story is curiously the thing that holds our story together, like a ratty cotton belt of an old karate uniform. Without the belt, it's just a lousy bathrobe, but with, it becomes an instrument of masterful defense and potential annihilation.
The different thing that Jack Butler executes here is a move like jujitsu instructor Roger Wing does in his ghetto studio - not a sucker punch or a constant wailing, but a deftly placed kick when you, the reader, go on the attack of the story. Jujitsu for Christ does not attack your senses the way hooligans in Harry Crews' books do, no does it methodically hunt you like a Cormac McCarthy anti-protagonist. Butler places just the right hit to the chest cavity required to leave you on the floor, momentarily hollowed by the blow, waiting for the air to come back.
The Freedom Fighters are descending on Mississippi as low boil teen romances and personality crises erupt, all things bent on redefining what seems to be the inevitable, the persistent. Mirroring that, a metafictional aspect creeps up through the novel, coming to a throbbing head in the "Mississippi Vortex Fever" chapter, a magnificent Revelation in the Biblical, contextual and narrative sense. It's one of Joyce's 100-letter thunderclaps from Finnegans Wake manifested as a cloud of gnats hanging in the humidity. I can see where this hallucinatory poetics would lose readers; I got lost in it, but then I like being lost.
The metafiction is to the novel as the participatory horror/joyousness of the South is to the people that live here. The unraveling of our story is curiously the thing that holds our story together, like a ratty cotton belt of an old karate uniform. Without the belt, it's just a lousy bathrobe, but with, it becomes an instrument of masterful defense and potential annihilation.
January 1, 2014
Jack Butler’s Jujitsu for Christ (1986) isn’t underrated in the sense that the people who read it don’t get it; rather, it’s that not enough people are reading it in the first place. This is because the novel was for a long time criminally out of print -- but only until last year, when the University Press of Mississippi released a new edition (to which I contributed a critical afterword, full disclosure). It would be irresponsible to speculate that it had been kept from the public eye by a shadowy cabal of writers -- not just southerners, either, but American writers generally and a few Swedes as well -- who know that their work would seem dim and anemic compared to Butler’s, so I won’t do that.
But I will say that the novel is funny, sexy, disturbing, heartbreaking, and completely unlike any of the books that you might think it would be like based on its title, cover illustration, or jacket description. There is something to delight or horrify on every page, but if you need to scan a few pages to be convinced, look no further than the section labeled “Summertime”: an accurate, hilarious, and devastating description of the uniquely hallucinogenic properties of a Mississippi summer.
You’d be cheating yourself to stop there, though. The novel does not so much forge connections between apparently disparate topics such as civil rights, martial arts, science fiction, and Southern Baptists as it reveals how inextricably connected all those things, and dozens of others, already are in the first place. And maybe that’s the novel’s signal achievement: How it challenges assumptions about what can be said and what should be discussed about the South; how it reveals Mississippi to be a bigger, stranger, and more mysterious place than most people ever allow themselves to recognize.
But I will say that the novel is funny, sexy, disturbing, heartbreaking, and completely unlike any of the books that you might think it would be like based on its title, cover illustration, or jacket description. There is something to delight or horrify on every page, but if you need to scan a few pages to be convinced, look no further than the section labeled “Summertime”: an accurate, hilarious, and devastating description of the uniquely hallucinogenic properties of a Mississippi summer.
You’d be cheating yourself to stop there, though. The novel does not so much forge connections between apparently disparate topics such as civil rights, martial arts, science fiction, and Southern Baptists as it reveals how inextricably connected all those things, and dozens of others, already are in the first place. And maybe that’s the novel’s signal achievement: How it challenges assumptions about what can be said and what should be discussed about the South; how it reveals Mississippi to be a bigger, stranger, and more mysterious place than most people ever allow themselves to recognize.
September 12, 2007
I love this book. It may be a perfect little novel. Finishing this, you wonder why other novels need to be so long. The writing, the language of the characters, makes you want to read it aloud to someone, as well as laugh out loud. It will make you horny. It will make you cry.
April 7, 2008
It was nice to read a southern novel so dialect-heavy and see the author pull it off, make it beautiful, and manage to break my heart too. Both elegant and ugly in the truths it reveals. A book I will read again in a few years.
November 3, 2011
I read this book on a recommendation from the Deep South group. And boy am I glad I picked this book up.
Weighing in at just over 200 pages it's not a daunting read at all. And the characters and place descriptions grab you from the get go, or gitgo as Jack Butler may have penned it.
The story takes place in Missippi back in the race-focused 1960's. It centers around a young white man doing his own thing in a colored part of town. His thing happens to Jujitsu and he starts a club that uses Jujitsu to help one come closer to Jesus.
The language throughout the whole book is spot on! Some folks are filled with the "Holy Spurt" and those that aren't may just get called "werfless".
There are a few sex scenes that were a bit graphic for me. I see how they were needed for the characters to develop, but some of the descriptions were a bit distracting and could have been handled differently. But I also know this has more to do with personal taste than Butler's ability as a story teller.
And that's exactly what this is, southern story telling at its best.
There are parts that will have laughing outloud, parts that'll have you so mad you could spit and a part that paints the hottest summer I've ever experienced!
This book is highly recommended.
Weighing in at just over 200 pages it's not a daunting read at all. And the characters and place descriptions grab you from the get go, or gitgo as Jack Butler may have penned it.
The story takes place in Missippi back in the race-focused 1960's. It centers around a young white man doing his own thing in a colored part of town. His thing happens to Jujitsu and he starts a club that uses Jujitsu to help one come closer to Jesus.
The language throughout the whole book is spot on! Some folks are filled with the "Holy Spurt" and those that aren't may just get called "werfless".
There are a few sex scenes that were a bit graphic for me. I see how they were needed for the characters to develop, but some of the descriptions were a bit distracting and could have been handled differently. But I also know this has more to do with personal taste than Butler's ability as a story teller.
And that's exactly what this is, southern story telling at its best.
There are parts that will have laughing outloud, parts that'll have you so mad you could spit and a part that paints the hottest summer I've ever experienced!
This book is highly recommended.
March 12, 2013
I’m overjoyed that Banner Books has released a new edition of Jack Butler’s “Jujitsu for Christ.” This is a modern classic that, while successful when first published in1986, never gained the widespread popularity and critical acclaim it deserved. It should forever be on shelves next to “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Faulkner’s “Sanctuary” and other classics of Southern literature. No other author has succeeded in picturing the Deep South of the 1960s with such truth, understanding, compassion and outrageous humor. The damp heat of Mississippi in the summertime seeps into the reader’s bones along with the racial tension of the time.
Roger Wing, a scrawny, misfit, born-again white boy, opens a martial arts studio in a segregated black neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi and is taken in as a stray by the Gandy family — a large and diverse black family. From Little Wide Load to Mosey Froghead, “Jujitsu for Christ” is peopled with inventive and lovable characters, none of whom shines more brightly than Roger. To top it all off, Roger’s introduction to sex is one of the funniest and sexiest love scenes ever written. This book is a jewel.
Roger Wing, a scrawny, misfit, born-again white boy, opens a martial arts studio in a segregated black neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi and is taken in as a stray by the Gandy family — a large and diverse black family. From Little Wide Load to Mosey Froghead, “Jujitsu for Christ” is peopled with inventive and lovable characters, none of whom shines more brightly than Roger. To top it all off, Roger’s introduction to sex is one of the funniest and sexiest love scenes ever written. This book is a jewel.
November 21, 2008
This book is about a white kid named Roger Wing in civil rights era Mississippi who becomes interested in jujitsu and opens his own studio in the black part of town, simultaneously joining a Christian Youth Fellowship because he's attracted to a girl named Patsy Wingo, who becomes his occasional lover. The author doesn't mention the similarity in their last names, nor the similarity between Roger's first name and the name of Patsy's eventual boyfriend Roger "Tut" Tutweiler, but you can't miss it, so I guess it was intentional. The final couple of chapters are puroposely "experimental" and I confess they pretty much lost me. Sorry, Butler!
October 16, 2015
About a seventh of this book I couldn't follow…stream of consciousness akin to hallucinations. By the end didn't even fully understand why Roger took Marcus away. Maybe I was just lulled into apathy by then. But there are flashes of brilliance, of profundity. Just couldn't come to care much about any of the characters.
It's deeply Southern, and as far as I know an accurate portrayal of African-American life in a 1960s Mississippi town.
It's deeply Southern, and as far as I know an accurate portrayal of African-American life in a 1960s Mississippi town.
February 2, 2010
This is actually more like a 3.5 star book. The last half of the book was great but the first half was pretty tedious and didn't flow well at all. However the latter section definitely makes it worth the read.
May 2, 2018
It took me a long time to finish this book, mostly because I took a long break in the middle when there was always something else I’d rather read when the choice presented itself.
This book is a mess. Honestly, I’m not sure I really understood it or the choices Butler made in writing it. I can’t say I recommend it but it does try some interesting things, I guess. It reads like an ambitious first novel, which it is.
This book is a mess. Honestly, I’m not sure I really understood it or the choices Butler made in writing it. I can’t say I recommend it but it does try some interesting things, I guess. It reads like an ambitious first novel, which it is.
August 31, 2017
A sleeper of Southern literature, from what I understand. Interesting story, told in an experimental style that at time makes following along more difficult than I'd like. Spoiler alert - if you want a good surprise, don't read the last sentence before you begin - if you want to avoid reading the book twice, peek! :-)
December 10, 2025
This was a 3.5.
September 7, 2015
Friends of mine gave me this book as a joke, since I'm both a Jiu-jitsu instructor and not a religious guy. Seeing the crucified gi on the cover and the wacky blurb about hootenannies and lynch mobs they thought they had a great goofy joke.
Turns out though, Butler is a *terrific* writer. And he hooked me with this story immediately, right from the start the martial arts instructor getting into trouble and having to shake down a kid for gas money really hit home!
About 2/3rds of this book are a perfect novel in the shape of a more poignant Confederancy For Dunces, and in parts something like Going All the Way. The other third, which is interspersed into the the other 2/3rds--so that there really are no points at which you can mark the take off in the narrative--is more a kind of thriller. And the thriller part is kind of heavy-handed and self-evident. Blood is spilled and bizarre events occur in the forest. . . . lots of folks REQUIRE such to happen in their novels for them to keep reading. My feeling was the novel was PERFECT without it.
I don't blame Prof. Butler for horning that stuff in, hell, he's published I'm not, he teaches writing, I suffer unemployment, etc etc. Who am I to judge? On the other hand, if I leave that aside, the horror that erupts from such a fun story, full of sweetness and dippy human foibles (the "hilarious coming of age story"), is fine without it. Butler is best when he's harpooning the status quo, not when he's giving us the blades and blood. But I'm the guy who didn't require the triple child murder/suicide in Jude the Obscure, just so you know where I'm coming from.
Butler's prose is magnificent. His first joint smoking experience is brilliant. His description of Mississippi summer is unforgettable (100 cubed) and even his seemingly offhanded remarks, i.e. about love and how love blinds our senses to being pricked by our lovers - and the southern preachers ranting about the "holy spurt", are spot on. There is something in an experimental writing course going on here that I suppose I wanted from Coover but I got more powerfully from Butler.
https://vimeo.com/64267991 here is Butler talking about a recent reprinting of this old novel!
Turns out though, Butler is a *terrific* writer. And he hooked me with this story immediately, right from the start the martial arts instructor getting into trouble and having to shake down a kid for gas money really hit home!
About 2/3rds of this book are a perfect novel in the shape of a more poignant Confederancy For Dunces, and in parts something like Going All the Way. The other third, which is interspersed into the the other 2/3rds--so that there really are no points at which you can mark the take off in the narrative--is more a kind of thriller. And the thriller part is kind of heavy-handed and self-evident. Blood is spilled and bizarre events occur in the forest. . . . lots of folks REQUIRE such to happen in their novels for them to keep reading. My feeling was the novel was PERFECT without it.
I don't blame Prof. Butler for horning that stuff in, hell, he's published I'm not, he teaches writing, I suffer unemployment, etc etc. Who am I to judge? On the other hand, if I leave that aside, the horror that erupts from such a fun story, full of sweetness and dippy human foibles (the "hilarious coming of age story"), is fine without it. Butler is best when he's harpooning the status quo, not when he's giving us the blades and blood. But I'm the guy who didn't require the triple child murder/suicide in Jude the Obscure, just so you know where I'm coming from.
Butler's prose is magnificent. His first joint smoking experience is brilliant. His description of Mississippi summer is unforgettable (100 cubed) and even his seemingly offhanded remarks, i.e. about love and how love blinds our senses to being pricked by our lovers - and the southern preachers ranting about the "holy spurt", are spot on. There is something in an experimental writing course going on here that I suppose I wanted from Coover but I got more powerfully from Butler.
https://vimeo.com/64267991 here is Butler talking about a recent reprinting of this old novel!
January 5, 2018
I was expecting a hokey club where Christians meet and do jiujitsu, maybe the story of one of the members, high school "drama" ensues. The gi on the cover done in a cross, I didn't know how to take.
What I ended up with was a great story about race in Mississippi in the 1950s and 60s. Great in that Butler writes about our personal lack of control of life and hopelessness of the situation then. I don't think you'll predict the ending, which is a plus. There really isn't jiujitsu as I know it, but there was some shotokan karate and maybe tai chi thrown in, an interesting twist.
So it was completely different than I was expecting- excellent- and I'm surprised I haven't heard about it in discussions of literature on race.
What I ended up with was a great story about race in Mississippi in the 1950s and 60s. Great in that Butler writes about our personal lack of control of life and hopelessness of the situation then. I don't think you'll predict the ending, which is a plus. There really isn't jiujitsu as I know it, but there was some shotokan karate and maybe tai chi thrown in, an interesting twist.
So it was completely different than I was expecting- excellent- and I'm surprised I haven't heard about it in discussions of literature on race.
December 4, 2009
That's why titties have gotten so big, is too many people don't get to see nipples in their formative years. No nipples, our subconscious says, well ok. I'll go for cleavage then. You won't give me the dots I want to see, I'll set up a feedback in the social structure, and select for big titties.
As soon as the human race invents antigravity, we'll grow titties as big as mountains. As big as planets. This little itty bitty woman will be stuck on them somewhere, way at the back, neglected, a curiosity item. Nobody will notice her. They will all be too busy building civilizations on her titties. Big double planets floating in space.
As soon as the human race invents antigravity, we'll grow titties as big as mountains. As big as planets. This little itty bitty woman will be stuck on them somewhere, way at the back, neglected, a curiosity item. Nobody will notice her. They will all be too busy building civilizations on her titties. Big double planets floating in space.
January 26, 2009
This is a very likable book on the order of Crazy in Alabama but without the charm. Hapless Roger Wing becomes a Christian when he is invited by a good looking girl to a high school bible study club. Post graduation, he witnesses by opening a karate studio in Jesus' name. This is in an extremely poor area of a city in Mississippi in the mid 60's. His friendship with a black family and the resulting conflicts are the bulk of the story.
August 26, 2013
Rating: 4.5 stars
I discovered this book years ago while I was still in college. I used it for a paper I wrote in a Southern Lit class. I remember thinking it was darkly funny, while sheding light on the disparities between races in the Deep South. If you can find a copy, I would highly encourage you to give this book a chance.
I discovered this book years ago while I was still in college. I used it for a paper I wrote in a Southern Lit class. I remember thinking it was darkly funny, while sheding light on the disparities between races in the Deep South. If you can find a copy, I would highly encourage you to give this book a chance.
June 13, 2008
Barry Hannah has a blurb on the back that says "quite possibly the best book ever," or something to that effect, so I picked it up because I love Barry Hannah. This book is AMAZING. Mind like water. AMAZING.
August 2, 2011
Full of beauty and sadness. Rivals some of Hannah's stuff. Everyone from Mississippi should read this.
August 17, 2011
I read this in the mid-80s and little did I know it'd be a great, enduring influence on me.
January 24, 2013
I enjoyed it. I will admit that it appealed to me a lot because I am from the deep south. A lot of the places , events and characters were very familiar to me.
March 1, 2014
You have to read this.
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