Faultless to a Fault

By Melvin Maddocks

A CRY OF ABSENCE by Madison Jones. 280 pages. Crown. $5.95.

The Southern novel, like the Chekhovian play, has become almost ritualistic. Through nobody's fault, the tradition now comprises a pattern of characters, symbols and plots so fixed and familiar that only a genius or a black militant novelist can escape literary predestination. Madison Jones is neither, though he is a very good writer with all sorts of credentials from the Southern establishment, including a Sewanee Review fellowship in fiction and the unreserved recommendations of James Dickey ("profound"), Allen Tate ("the Thomas Hardy of the South") and Andrew Lytle ("as spare as Aeschylus; as rich as Euripides").

A Cry of Absence is a measured book --the judiciously sympathetic, judiciously horrified and ever so slightly absurd portrait of an old-code Southern woman lost in the '70s. Hester Glenn, 48, is a daughter of the town's First Family, accustomed to finding her opinions prevailing, like the order of nature. With her usual demanding expectations, Miss Hester married a dashing young man, whose chief qualification was his resemblance, on horseback, to her ideal of a Confederate officer. Off the horse, he turned out to be a cad. Miss Hester--as rigid as she was frigid--raised her two fatherless sons more or less as if Appomattox (and her marriage) had never happened.

The trouble--as all readers of Southern novels know--is that the times are achanging. Northern industry, bringing Northern liberals, invades Hester's town. Black sons return from college, articulate with rage. Even the old Uncle Toms no longer shuffle the way they used to.

Worse, the Old Guard is changing too. When the Confederate monument across from the courthouse is vandalized, nobody except Hester appears in any hurry to restore it.

Minor Jocasta. After a black activist is lynched, the town, with an eye on that Northern industry, finally commits itself to a posture of creeping liberalism. In the community named for her family, Hester is left as alone as a carpetbagger.

Author Jones plays it both ways. Hester is clearly wrong. Her code has produced a monster of a younger son--a clean-cut all-American fanatic. Until she sees him for what he is, until she finds herself allied only to despised rednecks, Hester has been a bit of a monster herself --a moral as well as a social snob.

Yet, as her eyes open to the well-intentioned disaster that is her life, Jones allows her the stature and tragic privileges of a minor Jocasta. She is not only more to be pitied but more to be admired than her old friends, whose embrace of social justice is tepid with opportunism. It is also made evident that the doctrinaire liberals from the North are as blindly rigid as she.

As Jones pulls down his traditional Southern homestead traditionally --amid murder and suicide--he strikes the mood usual to Southern novelists: a coverall elegiac sadness. It is a bad time, he suggests, for all. His sociology, to judge by nonfiction accounts, is accurate. But what emerges is less a sense of history than a sense of style. The faultless hat is held over the faultless jacket over the faultless heart. All is stoic gallantry in a tradition that seems, at last, more correct than moving--a special kind of theater. And what is that exotic yet all too familiar sound in a reader's ear? Somewhere in the mythic South, where white pillars are carved with graffiti by Tennessee Williams, Margaret Leighton is warming up her Old Vic-Southern accent. Stand by, Hester.

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