Crossing Bully Creek

by Margaret Erhart

Book Overview

In Crossing Bully Creek, acclaimed author Margaret Erhart chronicles change through generations. As the scion of a large Southern plantation lies dying in the late 1960s, the various people who know... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1571310428
• ISBN13: 9781571310422
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 1.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Crossing Bully Creek-Reviewed by Tom Word

Crossing Bully Creek By Margaret Erhart (308 pp, Milkweed Editions) Reviewed by Tom Word Tucked into the southwest corner of Georgia lies a small chunk of heaven. As different from the rest of the rural south as Tiffany's from Wal-Mart, these unspoiled acres hold the Yankee-owned plantations, Gardens of Eden strewn with live oaks, longleaf pines, magnolias, pecans, and cypresses, trimmed in Spanish moss and carpeted with wiregrass. Discovered by titans of the Gilded Age as the 19th Century closed, and bought up cheap ($8 an acre) from planters and small farmers laid low by recurring recessions and the boll weevil, the lands were transformed into great estates. The attraction? An ideal winter climate and a small bird: the bobwhite quail. Quail hunting and collateral sport required a considerable labor force. That force was provided by Southern whites, formerly share croppers, and descendants of African slaves. The interdependence of the three peoples-rich Yankees, crackers, and blacks, made a witches' brew for a brand new culture. Nested in the affections and resentments of these long, close associations live the haunting characters of Crossing Bully Creek, Margaret Erhart's highly literary Milkweed Prize novel. And what characters they are. Erhart's style is evocative of both Faulkner and Hemingway. By restraint and a slow revealing of secrets in scenes from Longbrow's history over four decades, she creates a gripping story through characters the reader sees lurking in the shadows of Longbrow's ancient trees. Erhart knows first hand the people and place of which she writes. She has long spent winters on a plantation like her mythical Longbrow, a part of her family heritage. Crossing Bully Creek is her fourth novel, her earlier Old Love, Augusta Cotton and Unusual Company having attracted considerable critical acclaim.

Living Dangerously

It's always dangerous for a book or writer to invite comparisons with a great writer, because this almost always leaves the inviter looking smaller. Thus Crossing Bully Creek is living dangerously by inviting comparions with William Faulkner. Though the publisher is prudent enough not to mention Faulkner or other famous southern writers on the jacket, its inevitable that any literate reader will immediately think: Faulkner. For starters, there's the cover: an antebellum mansion set behind a canopy of magnolia trees. Then there's the jacket storyline blurb: the owner of a plantation that's seen better days is dying, and a whole family and a whole southern world seem to be swirling with him to some sort of reckoning, as seen through multiple viewpoints. Now you are thinking not just Faulkner, but As I Lay Dying. The blurb also says that the story moves back and forth between the 1920s and the 1960s, and now you are thinking: The Sound and the Fury--and even Faulkner couldn't live up to The Sound and the Fury. Maybe you notice that the publisher is from Minnesota, and even though Milkweed is one of the treasures of American publishing today, you still know that Minnesota is about the last place where the National Barbeque Association would hold their annual cook-off. Not only that, the jacket says that the author was born in New York City (at this point in the salsa commercial the cowboys around the campfire would say in unison: NEW YORK CITY?!?!) and went to school in Iowa and lives in Arizona. And she is proposing to write about life in the south? But not so fast there. Margaret Erhart wouldn't stand a chance in the annual bad Faulkner parody contest. She is the genuine goods, a graceful writer with her own voice and a story worth hearing. Just for starters, this story is set mainly at the end of the 1960s, an era Faulkner and other famous southern writers never lived to have a chance to come to grips with, an era of dramatic social change--or was it? One of the strengths of a novel with multiple viewpoints is that different characters are moving at their own speeds in their own orbits. Both the story of the times and the story of the family can look pretty different depending on whose eyes you look through. Indeed, the multiple viewpoints mean that you can either view the whole book as the story of a time as seen through the experience of a family, or the story of a family with the backdrop of a particular time. The multiple viewpoints also mean that every reader can take a particular personal interest in a different character or storyline and end up having a unique experience of the book. However you add up the whole, Erhart brings her own strengths to it. She has a keen poetic eye for the telling symbol or incident. She has a tender but not naive eye for human drama and family dynamics--and here's where women writers may have some advantages over the male writers whose heads are still ringing from the cannons and lost hon