Books in Brief: Catlin

Catlin, by Don Higgins (St. Martin’s, 215 pp., $9.95). What does it take to write a “Southern” novel? Don Higgins apparently decided he needed to use all the stock ingredients: a decaying mansion surrounded by live-oak trees draped in Spanish moss; an indomitable Southern matriarch (for that, read tyrant); a traditional faithful mammy type. Add to the above staples a few illegal cock fights and some down-home sex and you have the formula—anyhow, you have Catlin. Catlin is Don Higgins’s first novel. It does have some good moments, but more than two hundred pages from the point of view of a young-for-his-age 11-year-old is just a little too much. Young Chester St. Clair is brought by his mother to live in the small coastal community of Ruffin’s Inlet with Aunt Sissy after Chester’s father is committed to a mental institution. Chester is immediately taken in hand by Catlin, an orphan in the care of Aunt Sissy. His first impressions of Catlin are a pretty fair indication of the rest of the book: “I don’t play with girls much, but Catlin’s different. She was born a girl, but ever since she was born she’s wanted to be a boy. She told me so herself . . . She said she used to try to pee standing up like a boy. But she ain’t got a peeter so the pee ran down her leg. I told her I thought she was dumb. And she punched me and said she’d never tell me anything again. Catlin can punch doggone hard when she wants to, so I shut up about it.” Chester spends a lot of time listening in on adult conversations (with the more sophisticated Catlin acting as interpreter) and peeking in windows. No great truths emerge from Catlin, but it might serve as light summer reading if seeing everything through Chester’s eyes doesn’t drive you crazy.