Contemporary Southern Literature Doesn't Exist

By J.L. Mackey

The impetus for this came from reading Jordan M. Poss’ blog post “On the Appeal of Southern Grotesquery to Outsiders.” In it, he talks about Where the Crawdads Sing, which has taken the southern female readership by storm (it spent 168 weeks on the NYT bestseller list, and has apparently sold 12 million copies.) He goes on to talk about Dickey, O’Connor, and the general sentiment that southern literature has largely become a trope designed to cater to the sentiments of “Yankee audiences”: “...has been received superficially as meme-worthy objects of prurience or titillation by an audience too satisfied with its assumptions about hillbillies to hear its message.” Poss hits on the head a nail which I have long tripped over, sticking out of the floorboards. 

    Southern fiction has largely become fiction that merely takes place in the south. An Amazon search for “southern fiction novel” results in Danielle Steel (a New Yorker from money), “the southern book club’s guide to slaying vampires”, and countless “historical fiction” works. Now, I can’t blame Amazon’s algorithm for all the woes of the world, but the most popular living southern fiction writers, Ron Rash, Charles Frazier, Rick Bragg, etc etc, are nowhere to be found within the first ten pages of results. 

Searching Google for “southern novelists” brings up works like Transcendent Kingdom, summarized as: a PhD student in neuroscience goes back home to deal with family problems in Alabama.

To be fair, it’s hard to tell if people stopped reading southern fiction because it got soft, or southern fiction got soft because people stopped reading the gritty stuff. Both are possible, I suppose. A slow, downward slide into the corporate, commercial meat grinder. The appeal to more civilized, educated, and delicate sensibilities even bleeds onto the covers. Most of them look like they should be on a self-help or Malcolm Gladwell book. “Let’s think about things, but not too too hard, mmkay?”