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  • The novel "Blue Sabine," is a work of historical fiction about written by Gerald Duff (Nederland High School class of '57). The book, published by Moon City Press is available in paperback for $19.95. Courtesy Image

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  • Courtesy Photo Gerald Duff, author of the novel "Blue Sabine."

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Discussion

January 3, 2012

Duff casts a Yoknapatawpha spell over Triangle

Brandon Janes The Port Arthur News

— If Denis Johnson’s book “Tree of Smoke” is a long Mississippi River of a novel than Gerald Duffs “Blue Sabine” is its Southeast Texas counter part, with all the murky currents and eddies.

No review could be written of Duff’s novel, released in December by Moon City Press, without mention of William Faulkner’s 1930 novel “As I Lay Dying.”

To explain his Faulkner impressions, Duff told the News during a telephone interview that he shares his modesty and respect for the old master with Flannery O’Conner, a Faulkner contemporary, who once said that a southern writer must know, “When the Dixie Limited is roaring down the track you get your little buggy out of the way” — the train referring to Faulkner.

Unlike O’Conner, Duff seems to have gotten on board with the Faulknerisms. His book embraces the form of “As I Lay Dying” almost identically, going so far as to mimic the book’s famous five word chapter, which reads, “My mother is a fish.”

His chapter is 37 words long.

The matter of Duff’s novel is Faulknerian as well: a family history of five generations of women in the Holt family chronicled from 1867 to the present time.

Duff told the News that he wanted to be influenced by Faulkner with this book because in reading Faulkner he is overwhelmed with the feeling that, “He’s on to something true and vital,” Duff said.

He even kept a copy of “As I Lay Dying” next to him as he wrote this book.

But seeing only Faulkner in Duff’s novel would be a shallow reading.

Duff hits upon what I believe to be his own forte: Marital disfunction.

As revealed in his memoir, “Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory,” — featured at the 2011 Texas Book Festival in Austin — Duff’s life has been a long rocky road of failed romantic relationships with women.

To illustrate this Duff sets his novel in our own region of Texas, the one that borders Louisiana.

Border life is a revealing theme for Duff because in living on a border we are able to see what most defines us as Texans, distinct from all the others, a perspective that those in the middle of the state are not privy to.

Similarly, we see the true colors of man and woman when the two species come together.

What faults we may find with Duff, or his male characters, are made up for with their honesty and their fluent southern prosody.

“When a man sees the light of reason in his wife begin to flicker like a dying candle, he will allow himself knowingly to take actions that are without sense or true direction,” reads the frustrated husband Amos early in Duff’s novel.

This book is a bottomless pit of contextual aphorisms and southern insights, and it might even remind some men and women of Southeast Texas of the stories told to them by their grandfathers and grandmothers.

bjanes@panews.com

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