Gordon Blog One

In All The Kings Men the thing that really sticks out to me as southern are the descriptions and the language. The detailed recount of "old leather face" on page nine really caught my eye.  "Then the boss spied a fellow at the far end of the soda fountain, a tall, gaunt-shanked, malarial, leather-faced side of jerked venison wearing jean pants and a brace of mustaches hanging off the kind of face you see in photographs of General Forrest's cavalry men."  You can  immediately picture this weather worn southerner leaning over the bar taking a break from the heat of his work.  Its different from most books because Penn Warren does a beautiful job painting a picture of the character using a lot of descriptive words and phrases without repeating himself.  When introducing characters in my own writing I try to avoid stating the same thing twice which usually results in about a sentence or so of physical details.  These short sentences normally get the job done, but i usually feel like i could say more especially if it is a real person i know so much more about.  Jack dissects every physical aspect of most of the people they encounter in the book.  With these almost half page descriptions he makes characters that would be trivial in most books really come to life.

        The other thing that sticks out as distinctly southern is the language.  From the insults, to the dialects, to the biblical references you feel like you are on a different planet.  One of the first examples is also on page nine where Willie has a talk with old leather face.  "he was a good boy, old leather face allowed. "hit wuz a fahr fight, but had a leetle bad luck." He goes on to say things like "squahr" and "stobbed", and i makes you do a literary double take when you realize you can understand it and imagine that southern drawl.  As for the insults and biblical references page 15 does a nice job with both.  "Boils on the tail! somebody yelled back. Dammit Willie yelled right back lie one yore stummick and go to sleep!, And yelled Willie, thank the good lord who in his everlasting mercy saw fit to make something with a back side and a front side to it out of the skimpy little piece of material provided in your case!" These long almost eloquent insults are beautiful to read, most of the time you think of an insult and one or two word phrases come to mind.  In this case the rambling come back makes you laugh out loud because of the mock-biblical tone and the image that it creates making you wish you could come up with something as clever as that.

        Finally our wonderful, world-weary narrator Jack who tells a story in interesting parts.  You can tell he is being intentionally vague in some places and in other he provides a ridiculous amount of detail on something that seemingly has nothing to do with the story. The book is just what thoughts are going through his head as he is reminded of things going through his day, not necessarily focused on telling a story in the traditional sense.  My favorite example is the tangent that he takes on page 17 when he talks about how he meet Willie.  We might need to invent a new word for this epic flashback which lasts for 13 pages and has very little to do with what is currently going on in the story. Again very thought like in that the narration goes back and forth between the present and the memory, as someone might when day dreaming during a car ride, really letting you see the world through Jack's eyes.
(Sorry guys this got way to long)