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Travels into unique cultures detailed in these recent novels

Conventional wisdom holds that the New South is now just like the rest of America, a green belt of suburban sprawl served by the same chain stores and restaurants as everywhere else, with the region's indigenous culture being slowly overgrown and choked out by the kudzu-like tendrils of cable TV and the Internet. But the roots of true Southern culture run far too deep to be so easily plowed under. Magazine journalist Burkhard Bilger recounts in the introduction to Noodling for Flatheads: Moonshine, Monster Catfish and Other Southern Comforts (Scribner, $24) that one day while living in Cambridge, Mass., he got a sudden atavistic hankering to own a coonhound like those he remembered from his boyhood in Oklahoma. His search led him to a series of outlandish but totally true tales of Southern arcana existing in the gaps between the Gaps, the Blockbusters, and the Applebees'. Noodling collects eight such yarns, each a compelling view of a wilder, woollier South that resists homogenization by its very nature.

Noodling delves into subjects that many Southerners, mindful of the region's backward image, scorn: cockfighting, moonshining, and the eating of little-used animal parts. Said monitors of Southern defamation have nothing to fear from the author. The title piece is a doozy, as Bilger catches up with a childhood friend who makes a pastime of fishing for catfish the size of a grown man's thigh using just his fingers for bait and his arm for tackle. It's the stuff of bad Southern-fiction parody, but Bilger handles the story, as he does throughout, with can't-argue reporting, a tangible participatory zeal, and a light, dry touch. Most importantly, he checks any condescension or generalization in the face of all this florid local color and focuses on the often mundane, often bizarre realities of the modern cockfighters and moonshiners he meets—realities that continue to evolve underneath the boilerplate myths and stereotypes.

While Bilger clearly relishes his dips into these surviving traces of the South's idiosyncratic past, Noodling for Flatheads anecdotal anthropology also faces questions about its future. A chapter ostensibly on chitlins, nee chitterlings (cooked pig intestines, in case you're wondering), muses on the place of traditional Southern African-American cuisine and culture in the New South. A piece on the theory that Kentuckians may risk contracting Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (aka, "mad cow disease") from eating squirrel brains ends up as a comment on the bedrock hardiness of some Southern ways and how outsiders criticize these ways at their own risk. While Bilger resists positing any grand, overarching theories, the poetic final piece on a community of marble players along the Tennessee-Kentucky border wraps up the book by making explicit its running theme. Obscure though they may be, the Southern cultures Bilger profiles are living things, liable to fail or thrive on their own merits despite the gawkings of outsiders or best intentions of folklorists. And like a monster catfish waiting in a hole in a muddy bank to chomp down on a wiggling finger, they are still quite capable of surprise.

—Lee Gardner

Sometimes patience and determination really does pay off—as is the case with Tim Park's Destiny (Arcade, $24.95). Both difficult and rewarding, the novel requires a great deal of effort on the part of the reader. A dark tale of a marriage brought to the brink of collapse by both partners' infidelity and a schizophrenic son's suicide, Destiny can be dramatic, revealing and even funny. The book can also be a trying read.

The novel begins as Christopher Burton, an English journalist married to an Italian woman and living in Rome, learns of his son's self-inflicted demise. At this point, Burton comes to the conclusion that all of the remaining bonds of his marriage have dissolved. Burton grapples with questions concerning his son's suicide, his failed marriage, his profession and the general facade that comprises his life—all the while dealing with the grisly and uncomfortable business of arranging his son's funeral.

Parks' style, a daunting barrage of stream of consciousness, is both the author's selling point and his fatal flaw. The protagonist's inner dialogue is so realistic that it includes seemingly endless digressions. These digressions can either be perceived as part of a rich tapestry of thought, or merely serve as pratfalls for the reader.

Once the groundwork is laid at the beginning of the book, the streaming begins and the pace is relentless. Parks' paragraphs average from six to eight pages each—requiring true focus, lest the reader get lost in the avalanche of verbiage. Hopefully, Parks has taken the stream of consciousness style to its furthest excess with Destiny. Any more would be overkill.

If readers can just manage to soldier on through the labyrinthine twists of Parks' long winded prose, the rewards will come. The diverse occurrences in the plot eventually reach a grand alignment, building a dramatic conclusion that caught me by surprise.

—John Sewell