Books, Arts & Manners: Going to Excess

Cold Sassy Tree, by Olive Ann Burns (Ticknor & Fields, 391 pp., $16.95)

‘YOU can’t understand it. You would have to be born there.” So says Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!, dismissing Shreve McCannon’s efforts to define the Southern identity. That the outsider—the “yankee”—cannot know the South is a belief deeply ingrained in the Southern consciousness. This assumption is both the consolation and the curse of the Lost Cause. What results is, as Henry James noted, “half a defiance and half a deprecation”; or, to put it another way, a pride and an insecurity— a pride felt partly in the distinction of being different, and an insecurity born largely of the isolation of being misunderstood.

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Loxley F. Nichols

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Cold Sassy Tree, by Olive Ann Burns (Ticknor & Fields, 391 pp., $16.95)

‘YOU can’t understand it. You would have to be born there.” So says Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!, dismissing Shreve McCannon’s efforts to define the Southern identity. That the outsider—the “yankee”—cannot know the South is a belief deeply ingrained in the Southern consciousness. This assumption is both the consolation and the curse of the Lost Cause. What results is, as Henry James noted, “half a defiance and half a deprecation”; or, to put it another way, a pride and an insecurity— a pride felt partly in the distinction of being different, and an insecurity born largely of the isolation of being misunderstood.