Tuscaloosa Knights

Like others, I'm not entirely sure whether I liked or disliked this story. I felt very much like I knew it already--not just because I'm fairly familiar with Tuscaloosa, but also because I'm familiar with the culture of Alabama: football, Bear Bryant, and the KKK. In fact, the story felt so familiar to me that I don't really know that it added anything new to me.

I thought it was well-written; the prose felt fluid enough to me, detailed, and with a good rhythm and progression of story. He had some excellent images, from But the story never felt like more than the sum of its parts: disjointed in some ways, like it never quite coalesced into a single story. We had bits on Pinion, the husband in Switzerland (Switzerland? Really?), on Bear Bryant, Bryce, the Klan, even on how backwards Tuscaloosa was compared to Poughkeepsie. I get it, I know this stuff already.

Maybe I would have been more interested in the story itself if I weren't from the South. Maybe someone from Poughkeepsie would be interested in seeing the atmosphere of culture that Vice creates--but would they really need to read it, either? I imagine they know as well as we Southerners know, about shooting the breeze on a front porch with bourbon and mint. about the KKK's activities, about the casual indifference of even otherwise 'respectable' people like Pinion toward his black servants. Pinion, incidentally, seemed less to disagree with the Klan than to think they were some watered-down version of the real thing--I suspected he still harkened back to the glory days of the Klan "when there was a reason for it" like when his grandfather was the boss.

When it really gets down to it, it's just an amalgation of all the stereotypical images associated with Alabama--even if those images were well-written.