Sweet and Low

More than a collection of stories, Nick White’s Sweet and Low works like a three-dimensional wooden puzzle whose parts resemble one another despite their different shapes and fit together finally in a cohesive, if fragile, form. Set in Mississippi, Sweet and Low assembles the history and mythology of the Culpepper family, whose men suffer from weak hearts, both physically and emotionally. In the title story, Reuben Culpepper “probably didn’t have much of a chance” against Felicia’s “looks,” and their son, Forney, who narrates several of the stories, falls for Maggie in “The Curator” after barely a glance. Reuben, like his father and, later, his brother Lucas dies of a heart attack, young, but these stories aren’t exactly about such losses. Rather, the collection fixates on endings that happen a few steps short of closure, and White situates his reader at emotional crossroads: Hope is just about done getting run over, but whatever crews may come to do the cleanup remain far away.

“The Lovers,” for example, takes place in the shadow of Arnie Greenlee’s death. He’s headed to a Doctors Without Borders mission in Ecuador when his plane goes down, leaving Rosemary Greenlee (his spouse) and Hank (his gay lover) to cross paths a year later, each trying to shore up what’s left of a family memory. In “Sweet and Low,” similarly, Forney and his mother “had once been united in their love for his father,” but his father’s death is the premise of the story, not its crux. In “Break” and “Cottonmouth, Trapjaw, Water Moccasin,” the protagonists have already had enough: now they are ready to be bitten and poisoned, or bitten and mauled, by an animal. Through the collection, Mississippi menaces, a “curse” hangs over the Culpeppers and maybe the whole region, and the space for gentleness is limited whether one is young or old, straight or queer, as famous as The Author in “The Curator” or as unknown as Eric, a gay vacationer in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in “Gatlinburg.”

Though still a child, he does what he can to seek expiation, and that work sends his light back over the whole book, as though all the stories were his own.

Humans, however, not animals or states, inflict the real violence in Sweet and Low, and the book examines the violence to ask whether, as emotions swing from wondrous confusion to nearly murderous rage, it remains possible for art to carry one out of oneself. Some stories seem to answer clearly in the negative: “These Heavenly Bodies” is about the promise of art to reveal, not to heal. Teenage Benjamin’s awe of Bella and Beth Cade and his desire to draw them gives him purpose, but these feelings dispel the cloud of violence surrounding him only temporarily. His schoolmate Lucy’s unreciprocated feelings for him generate a tension that Benjamin’s drawings cannot address, and in the end their personal conflict subsumes Benjamin’s artistic efforts, not the other way around.

And yet, through “Sweet and Low,” “The Exaggerations,” “The Curator,” and “The Last of His Kind,” the chance of making one’s own meaning or making it out, even in the face of violence, slowly emerges. Narrated in the third person, “Sweet and Low” is the collection’s best story. Forney Culpepper’s anger is more restrained and less well trained than Benjamin’s in “These Heavenly Bodies,” and the emotional bonds that he almost forms, first with his widowed mother, Felicia, and later with the scoliosis-ridden Buck, who believes in Felicia’s voice and promise, convince utterly.

In “Exaggerations,” Forney takes over the narration, considering his Uncle Lucas’s storytelling techniques and cracking open some space between the tellers of Nick White’s world and the world itself: “It wasn’t that [Uncle Lucas] attempted to drop morals in with his exaggerations, I don’t think, or give life lessons exactly, like the parables of Jesus. No, what he was doing with his storytelling was trying to shape the world into something better than it was.” Uncle Lucas was trying, and Forney tries, too. But “better than it was” isn’t a very high bar: By the time Buddy Cooper erupts into violence, near midnight at his own bachelor party, we have already learned well that both boys and men use their fists in White’s stories, whenever words won’t come. But despite this violence, and although the story’s beautiful ending is snapped off by a prosaic, truth-telling coda that denies connection, redemption, and repentance, the story doesn’t necessarily entail a failure for art. In the arc of the whole collection, we haven’t yet arrived at the “survivor.

Humans, however, not animals or states, inflict the real violence in Sweet and Low, and the book examines the violence to ask whether, as emotions swing from wondrous confusion to nearly murderous rage, it remains possible for art to carry one out of oneself.

Forney’s narration returns in “The Curator,” another bitter meditation on authorship, and it’s here that author-characters really proliferate. Neither Uncle Lucas nor Forney is a stand-in for White, at least on my reading. Neither is The Author (whose biography and era map vaguely onto William Faulkner’s); and neither is Holcomb, whom Forney envies as much for his publishing success as for Maggie’s affections. Instead, “The Curator” offers up a self-deprecating species of literary mirroring: Maggie and Culpepper wind up burning a pile of Holcomb’s books when he takes a plum job at a college up north; and even though Maggie assures Culpepper, “One day … you’ll write about this summer,” Culpepper doesn’t advance in the story beyond a desperate plea “to be heard by someone other than me.”

No, it’s the youngest Culpepper, Henry, who doesn’t appear until the collection’s final story, “The Last of His Kind,” who provides the perspective, still bleak, which nonetheless offers a way out for artists and art. Henry “has read about boys and animals, how they form a connection, and then the animal most surely dies.” Henry is a killer himself, but he also seems to grasp the sum of his family’s and his state’s histories. Though still a child, he does what he can to seek expiation, and that work sends his light back over the whole book, as though all the stories were his own. “I want to be a writer,” Henry says. The gesture fails to placate Forney, but the desire’s earnestness recolors other moments in the book, just barely keeping the hope alive that talking can do some good.

Sweet and Low: The collection’s title resonates with the country music that provides one likely soundtrack to the collection. (You could make yourself a playlist: Hank Williams, George Jones and Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, Kitty Wells, and Lynn Anderson.) In the title story, Buck’s sweet tooth plays a role, and sweet and low is a way of talking, too. Still, it’s hard not to hear the brand name of the artificial sweetener underneath: Sweet’n Low, the kind of substitute for good feelings that almost every character in the book has to live with in order to live on.

There’s No Place for Gentleness in this World

A review of Nick White's Sweet and Low