CNN - Review: 'Be Sweet' - August 5, 1998

(CNN) -- The stuff that makes Roy Blount Jr. a joy to read is in this book; it's just hidden under a tangle of family secrets, old hurts, and the sound of a man questioning his life and relationships.

Roy Blount is an heir to the writing of James Thurber and Robert Benchley, a relatively normal man examining the world with a perception simultaneously off-kilter and completely on target. In "Be Sweet" he again examines his world, but this time the mood is closer to Ibsen than Thurber. He's asking hard questions more at home in Scandanavian drama than Southern humor, and he's bracing himself for hard truths about himself and his family.

"Please, I got children and a wife at home," the patrolman pleads, stepping away from his cruiser. Thelma keeps her .38 pressed under his ear and Louise looks on wide-eyed. Her response is cool and to the point. "Are you sweet to her? You better be sweet. My husband wasn't sweet to me, and look how I turned out".

Blount ponders his mother's directives to "be sweet," and wonders why he feels she was never satisfied that he was sweet enough. Surprised to find himself a single 55-year-old who is "doomed to make a living being silly," he begins examining the influences that made him who he is. Intellectually dissecting humor almost guarantees tedium.

To Blount's credit, he doesn't ponder over the mechanics of what he does, why his stuff is good where others fall flat. He doesn't even seem to be concerned with whether or not his writing is good at all. (Take my word for it -- he is one of the best. His "Ode to Ham" is a poetic masterpiece.) He does, however, go into the unlit corners of his self-image to get his answers.

"How did I come to be a single grandfather?"

"What is the family curse, and how can I lift it?"

Blount digs into the past searching for the key to his mother's behavior, surely a tricky venture in even the happiest of families. His pursuit takes us scuba diving in Nassau, to the couches of the "Tonight Show," to Sunday school in the First Methodist Church of Decatur, Georgia. We watch as his mother keeps a "strenous, resentful house," with the occasional reminder that the simple act of giving birth to little Roy almost killed her.

Wrangling with male-female relationships, he turns the whole Mars-Venus concept on its ear and throws in James Earl Jones and Newt Gingrich for good measure, but there's the echo of his self-described "serial-fizzled relationships" in the background.

I hope Roy has quieted the nagging questions that set him on this quest, and can now get back to writing that is less painful to read. Finding his answers is almost anticlimatic; the rich meandering tales scattered along his path of discovery are what makes this book worth reading.

Karen Austin is a freelance writer and environmental activist based in Georgia.