Lewis Nordan (1939–2012)
Author of Wolf Whistle
About the Author
Lewis Nordan was born in Forest, Mississippi on August 23, 1939. He received a bachelor's degree from Millsaps College, a master's degree from Mississippi State University, and a Ph.D. from Auburn University. He taught at the University of Arkansas and elsewhere before joining the faculty at the show more University of Pittsburgh. He retired from there in 2005. His first book, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair, was published in 1983. His other works include Wolf Whistle, Lightning Song, Sugar among the Freaks, and Boy with Loaded Gun. He died due to complications of pneumonia on April 13, 2012 at the age of 72. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Bookcover
Series
Works by Lewis Nordan
Associated Works
The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood, and Freedom (2004) — Contributor — 186 copies, 7 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Nordan, Lewis
- Legal name
- Nordan, Lewis Alonzo
- Other names
- Buddy Nordan
- Birthdate
- 1939-08-23
- Date of death
- 2012-04-13
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Millsaps College, Mississippi
Mississippi State University (MA ∙ Alabama ∙ PhD)
Auburn University (PhD) - Occupations
- professor (University of Pittsburgh; University of Georgia; University of Arkansas)
author - Organizations
- Fellowship of Southern Writers
- Awards and honors
- Hillsdale Award for Fiction (1997)
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Forest, Mississippi, USA
- Places of residence
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Itta Bena, Mississippi, USA
Sewickley, Pennsylvania, USA
Hudson, Ohio, USA - Place of death
- Cleveland, Ohio, USA (University Hospital)
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
Twelve year-old Leroy Dearman is growing up on his family’s llama farm in Mississippi. His mother, Elsie, craves romance. His younger sister seems hardened as a sailor, with language to match. His father, Swami Don, has one small, childlike arm from an accident when he was a boy – his own father shot it while climbing a fence. Lightning strikes the house regularly during storms, resulting in fire balls rolling on the roof and down the chimney.
This is a magical book, full of the wonder show more and discovery of youth. Nordan was a master at intermingling magic and ridiculous madness, as well as finding humor in tragedy. He can get a belly laugh out of death and heartache. “Just then Old Pappy died, Leroy noticed.”
Lightning Song is about the innocence of youth, and the loss of innocence. It’s about the joy of loving, and in Elsie’s words, how “true love lasts forever.” show less
This is a magical book, full of the wonder show more and discovery of youth. Nordan was a master at intermingling magic and ridiculous madness, as well as finding humor in tragedy. He can get a belly laugh out of death and heartache. “Just then Old Pappy died, Leroy noticed.”
Lightning Song is about the innocence of youth, and the loss of innocence. It’s about the joy of loving, and in Elsie’s words, how “true love lasts forever.” show less
Lewis Nordan works on the edge of magic. In Wolf Whistle the harsh reality of deeply ingrained racism and outright murder blends into fantasy and beauty and back again to real and ugly. In Arrow Catcher, Mississippi a black boy from Chicago named Bobo makes a weak and unsuccessful proposition to a wealthy white woman. She gives him a ride home to get him safely away from the scene of what she knows is considered a crime in the south.
Bobo turns up dead and two white suspects are put on trial, show more including the woman’s husband. That’s not the entire story. Nordan intertwines the lives of several of Arrow Catcher’s residents. Glenn Gregg is a nine year-old that severely burned himself trying to set his daddy, Solon, on fire. Alice, the new and innocently adulterous fourth grade teacher takes her students on a field trip to visit their burned classmate, as well as to the morgue, a sewage treatment plant and the murder trial. She’s still in love with an old college professor and although she feels almost like Jesus, being surrounded by children, she has “excellent reason to believe that Jesus never would in one million years have slept with a married man.”
Wolf Whistle combines the horrific with black humor and makes it sing. The blues of course, like Robert Johnson would. show less
Bobo turns up dead and two white suspects are put on trial, show more including the woman’s husband. That’s not the entire story. Nordan intertwines the lives of several of Arrow Catcher’s residents. Glenn Gregg is a nine year-old that severely burned himself trying to set his daddy, Solon, on fire. Alice, the new and innocently adulterous fourth grade teacher takes her students on a field trip to visit their burned classmate, as well as to the morgue, a sewage treatment plant and the murder trial. She’s still in love with an old college professor and although she feels almost like Jesus, being surrounded by children, she has “excellent reason to believe that Jesus never would in one million years have slept with a married man.”
Wolf Whistle combines the horrific with black humor and makes it sing. The blues of course, like Robert Johnson would. show less
Boy With Loaded Gun is a brutally honest and self-deprecating memoir by novelist Lewis Nordan. From his boyhood in Itta Bena (rhymes with Argentina), Mississippi to his later successful years, Nordan has no problem describing his own various foolish actions and the resultant heartache for his loved ones. From buying a mail-order pistol as a boy to his drinking and affairs (including one with a friend of his first wife), Nordan is harder on himself than anyone else.
Nordan is adept at finding show more the humor in bad situations. His scene of breaking off an affair with a woman half his age is ridiculously funny as he describes how he allows emotionally florid language and meaningless words to “substitute for the event in front of me.”
Nordan seems to be seeking cathartic freedom in writing the truth about his life. It makes for a great memoir. show less
Nordan is adept at finding show more the humor in bad situations. His scene of breaking off an affair with a woman half his age is ridiculously funny as he describes how he allows emotionally florid language and meaningless words to “substitute for the event in front of me.”
Nordan seems to be seeking cathartic freedom in writing the truth about his life. It makes for a great memoir. show less
The Publisher Says: Lewis Nordan’s fiction invents its own world—always populated by madly heroic misfits. In Music of the Swamp, he focuses his magic and imagination on a boy’s utterly helpless love for his utterly hopeless father—a man who attracts bad luck like a magnet. Nordan evokes ten-year-old Sugar Mecklin’s world with dazzling clarity: the smells, the tastes, and most surely the sounds of life in this peculiar, somewhat bizarre, Delta town. Sugar discovers that what his show more daddy says is true: “The Delta is filled up with death”; but he also finds an endless supply of hope.
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: This book was such a joy to find, to get from the publisher, to read...it has been a perfect experience. It's the twentieth anniversary of the original edition, so I suppose the publisher of all Nordan's work saw a need to fulfill. They've brought out Wolf Whistle and Lightning Song, so why stop now?
The sheer gorgeousness of the book's prose is no surprise to anyone already familiar with Author Nordan's work. Sugar, our kid narrator, isn't the artificial kind of kid that infests family stories. He's got the fire of a smart, frustrated kid, one who understands just enough to know he's not getting all the story. In the 1950s Mississippi Delta, there's more subtext than anywhere outside Japan.
Above all else, though, is the subject matter...the drunken daddy whose life has kicked him in the balls one too many times...the wearied, nibbled-at soul of a man who didn't get far and couldn't see where else to go. There's a good reason he doesn't really connect with anyone in his family. It's not one you'll find out early in the tales (these are braided stories telling a novel-sized plot) and, when you do find it out, you won't entirely understand the why of some things. I'll say this for Author Nordan's choice here: If these are lightly fictionalized autobiographical sketches there's a darn good reason he drew that veil.
The whole of a person's life is set in childhood, much though we resist that knowledge. The way Sugar loved his Daddy and was not loved in return is the way his own family will turn out. Anyone who's had that kind of family pattern blast its way through our own lives recognizes the unstoppable force of Family History. It takes intentionality, focus, powerful motivation, and a pile of luck to keep the past from repeating itself.
I would recommend this book to anyone who feels hemmed in, pecked at, torn, or simply needs a respite from daily life. The book is pretty much a perfect meditation on the cost of living an unexamined life!
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: This book was such a joy to find, to get from the publisher, to read...it has been a perfect experience. It's the twentieth anniversary of the original edition, so I suppose the publisher of all Nordan's work saw a need to fulfill. They've brought out Wolf Whistle and Lightning Song, so why stop now?
Daddy said, "It's funny how you end up somewhere, and then that's your life."
The sheer gorgeousness of the book's prose is no surprise to anyone already familiar with Author Nordan's work. Sugar, our kid narrator, isn't the artificial kind of kid that infests family stories. He's got the fire of a smart, frustrated kid, one who understands just enough to know he's not getting all the story. In the 1950s Mississippi Delta, there's more subtext than anywhere outside Japan.
Above all else, though, is the subject matter...the drunken daddy whose life has kicked him in the balls one too many times...the wearied, nibbled-at soul of a man who didn't get far and couldn't see where else to go. There's a good reason he doesn't really connect with anyone in his family. It's not one you'll find out early in the tales (these are braided stories telling a novel-sized plot) and, when you do find it out, you won't entirely understand the why of some things. I'll say this for Author Nordan's choice here: If these are lightly fictionalized autobiographical sketches there's a darn good reason he drew that veil.
A thousand times, when the train slowed or stopped, I thought of jumping off. I wanted to die in a ditch. I wanted to disappear. I wanted a different history and geography. In rhythm with the wheels I said I want I want I want I want I stayed on the train.
The whole of a person's life is set in childhood, much though we resist that knowledge. The way Sugar loved his Daddy and was not loved in return is the way his own family will turn out. Anyone who's had that kind of family pattern blast its way through our own lives recognizes the unstoppable force of Family History. It takes intentionality, focus, powerful motivation, and a pile of luck to keep the past from repeating itself.
The sound of the rain was without thunder. It was as constant as the feeling of loss that suddenly I felt inside me, that now I knew had been with me all along, a familiar part of me since the beginning of memory.
I would recommend this book to anyone who feels hemmed in, pecked at, torn, or simply needs a respite from daily life. The book is pretty much a perfect meditation on the cost of living an unexamined life!
I wish this story ended more happily than it actually does. All this happened a long time ago, and now I'm middle-aged and have been going to Don't Drink meetings for a good long while myself. There is a good deal of wreckage in my own past, a family I hurt in the same way my father hurt me, and the same way his father hurt him. I tore my children up as fine as cat's hair, you might say.show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.Lists
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