posted on 26 May 2016

A Garden of Sand by Earl Thompson

Thompson died young of heart disease in 1978 – he was only 47 years old – just as his reputation as a writer was becoming established. As a result his public profile has never really taken off and he can, I think, be thought of as something of a cult novelist.

A Garden of Sand was his first novel,  published in 1970 (1971 in the UK). The book is generally held to be highly autobiographical and was followed by two others that used a similar kind of fictionalised autobiography and can, despite the characters having different names, be seen as a trilogy. This first instalment was very well received by the literary critics and was nominated for the National Book Award.

It’s possible to get a hint of the style and content of the book by simply noting that it is dedicated to Nelson Algren – who is also a cult author specialising in the kind of unflinching urban outsider literature that this book aspires to. And this is very much what we get in this densely told tale of poverty in Kansas during the twenties and thirties. Set in Wichita we follow the life of the young Jack MacDerimid as he grows up around people fighting to survive on the wrong side of the tracks.

Jack grows up amongst petty criminals, prostitutes, gamblers, losers and simple working class people and farmers who are the collateral victims of the economic and political establishment. The book is full of unflinching detail and written with an intensity that that speaks to the autobiographical reality of the subject matter. I haven’t looked at other reviews of this book that might be out there but I would put a pretty sizeable wager on this book being described as ‘gritty’. When you hear this word being used it is most often employed as a euphemism for being sexually explicit and socially brutal and by this measure A Garden of Sand is most certainly ‘gritty’.

The issue that dominates this book is the implied incest between mother and son and venturing into this territory is always likely to split opinion. I personally have no problem with his element because it is truthful and integral to the book’s guiding spirit and sense of identity. However, I also think that sex really is the weakness of this novel. It seems to me that there is a real difference between being frank, truthful and explicit and being prurient, manipulative and pornographic and whilst I have no truck with any kind of censorship, I am uneasy about deliberately confusing these very different approaches.

It is entirely understandable that in Jack’s world there would be hateful, masochistic and violent characters who exploit women and not depicting that would clearly be an artificial manipulation of the reality Thompson wants to confront, but, for me, I find the writing lapses too often into a kind of fascinated relish that made me feel uncomfortable and voyeuristic. Only the very best writers can do sex well and maybe that’s the problem – Thompson just isn’t quite good enough to get away with it.

The book turns into something of a slog over the 500 pages of almost constant immersion in misery of one kind or another. There is humour here – the parrot who teaches Jack to swear with gusto for example – but it’s a bitter sort of humour, the humour of the loser and the outsider.

Make no mistake, this was a brave book and I can see how some people would find this a pretty intense read – I think I would have if I’d encountered it in my 20s or 30s. Now it feels to me very much like a young man’s (sic) book and, that now I’m that much older,  I’ve read other better authors who deal with the same territory in a more telling way.

If you want to read the book and make your own mind up, copies – both paperback and hardback – can be found on the internet quite easily and they won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

 

Terry Potter

May 2016