Review of Fountains of Youth by Stephen Ausherman
by Scott Yarbrough in storySouth
It's easy for a reader to take a wrong turn as he or she approaches
Stephen Ausherman's new novel, Fountains of Youth. But reading
through the novel might be like returning to a small, familiar town you
knew years ago—the roads and basic landmarks are the same, but
there's been a lot of development and the details are all different.
The book's narrator and protagonist, Cyrus Slant, seems initially to be a
character that we've met before, inhabiting a place that we've seen a few
too many times in the dusty environs of so-called "southern literature." He
is a case of arrested development: a young man (but not quite as young
as he seems) raised without exactly knowing who his father is, whose
mother died when he was still young and impressionable. He lives in and
works for the Dixie Court Hotel, in "Stillwater County" in North Carolina,
not far from one small town named "Odium" and another called "Hunters."
Stillwater County also comes complete with a mysterious swamp, an aged
black seer, a haunted house (with its own bottle tree for capturing the
rambunctious ha'nts), a mysterious, rebellious vanished Native American
named Quiet Bear (purportedly a Gingaskin Indian), and a wandering
idiot manchild (to borrow a riff by the Coen Brothers on Faulkner in
Barton Fink) who is tolerated affectionately by the community and who
likes to paint everything yellow.
Put this way, every cliché in the regionalist book seems to rear its ugly
head. It's only a matter of time before Otis checks himself into the jail to
sleep off a drunk, before some Snopes shows up wanting to sleep with
his sister (or even worse, your sister), and before long people will be
digging up the yard for gold on this side of the street while Confederate
ghosts thunder down the lane in a duststorm of butternut and gray.
Thankfully, however, the sum of the parts in Fountains of Youth are
greatly outweighed by its whole; Ausherman makes use of the more
familiar and treadworn characteristics of southern fiction largely to
subvert homespun myths and to comment on the very act of myth-
making. The Dixie Court Motel, for example, rather than being owned by
Compsons or Snopes or characters named Big Daddy or Stella Rondo, is
owed and operated by Indian immigrant Amitabh Patil, who has helped
raise Cyrus alongside his daughters Mina, Arati, and Cyrus' secret love,
the beautiful and absent Sonali.
Cyrus has been raised to think that his father is most likely either the
famous journalist and raconteur Lester Current (a kind of self-
mythologizing cross between a later day H.L. Mencken and Tom Wolfe),
or just possibly the local legend, the rebellious, mysterious, and absent
Quiet Bear. Obsessed with Current, Cyrus has read everything the man
has ever written and even has begun composing his own brief articles in
the manner of Current about his own friends, family and Stillwater County.
When Current returns to Stillwater County to confront the demons of his
youth and checks into the Dixie Court Motel, Cyrus, in turn, is able to
confront the legend of his maybe-father in the flesh. The man, as so
often seems to be the case, doesn't quite live up to the legend. When
Cyrus asks him whether he'd actually hunted moose with concussion
grenades and held a dying Israeli soldier in his arms, Current tells Cyrus
that he has "Applied my poetic license. Took some liberties with Madam
Hyperbole." When Cyrus asks how many embellishments have been
made, Current first tells him, "just a few details here and there," but finally
admits, "They sure add up fast over a lifetime."
Ultimately, the reader realizes that many of the novel's themes intersect in
Lester Current, and that the writer is in some ways more of a symbol than
a character. This is a novel about fathers: the father that Cyrus thinks
either Lester or Quiet Bear would be, on the one hand, and his surrogate
fathers in Patil and Moses Jefferson (the blind African American psychic)
on the other. Too, this is a novel about legends and myths, and the way
we use stories and folklore to create meaning and instill order on the
chaos that surrounds our lives. Even as Cyrus puts to rest some of his
own questions about his legacy and his past, he weaves new tales.
Ausherman takes chances in Fountains of Youth. So many novels set in
the south get so mired in the swamplands of formula and familiar tropes
that making use of those commonplace formulations in even postmodern,
subversive ways risks snap judgments on the parts of readers wearied by
the familiar. The romantic triangle between Cyrus and two of the Patil
sisters seems a bit obvious although the end of the novel takes some
turns that no one will see coming. And some of the articles by Current
and Cyrus inserted in the text throughout the novel tend to get a little
tedious and to slow the narrative's momentum. But through it all, Cyrus is
an engaging, likeable, and interesting narrator, and Ausherman paints
secondary characters like Patil, his daughter Mina, and Moses Jefferson
in subtle shades that reflect the full range of their humanity.
Fountains of Youth by Stephen Ausherman
Livingston Press,
ISBN: hardback 1-931982-55-4 ($25.00); paperback 1-931982-56-2
($14.95)
August 24, 2006
by Scott Yarbrough in storySouth
It's easy for a reader to take a wrong turn as he or she approaches
Stephen Ausherman's new novel, Fountains of Youth. But reading
through the novel might be like returning to a small, familiar town you
knew years ago—the roads and basic landmarks are the same, but
there's been a lot of development and the details are all different.
The book's narrator and protagonist, Cyrus Slant, seems initially to be a
character that we've met before, inhabiting a place that we've seen a few
too many times in the dusty environs of so-called "southern literature." He
is a case of arrested development: a young man (but not quite as young
as he seems) raised without exactly knowing who his father is, whose
mother died when he was still young and impressionable. He lives in and
works for the Dixie Court Hotel, in "Stillwater County" in North Carolina,
not far from one small town named "Odium" and another called "Hunters."
Stillwater County also comes complete with a mysterious swamp, an aged
black seer, a haunted house (with its own bottle tree for capturing the
rambunctious ha'nts), a mysterious, rebellious vanished Native American
named Quiet Bear (purportedly a Gingaskin Indian), and a wandering
idiot manchild (to borrow a riff by the Coen Brothers on Faulkner in
Barton Fink) who is tolerated affectionately by the community and who
likes to paint everything yellow.
Put this way, every cliché in the regionalist book seems to rear its ugly
head. It's only a matter of time before Otis checks himself into the jail to
sleep off a drunk, before some Snopes shows up wanting to sleep with
his sister (or even worse, your sister), and before long people will be
digging up the yard for gold on this side of the street while Confederate
ghosts thunder down the lane in a duststorm of butternut and gray.
Thankfully, however, the sum of the parts in Fountains of Youth are
greatly outweighed by its whole; Ausherman makes use of the more
familiar and treadworn characteristics of southern fiction largely to
subvert homespun myths and to comment on the very act of myth-
making. The Dixie Court Motel, for example, rather than being owned by
Compsons or Snopes or characters named Big Daddy or Stella Rondo, is
owed and operated by Indian immigrant Amitabh Patil, who has helped
raise Cyrus alongside his daughters Mina, Arati, and Cyrus' secret love,
the beautiful and absent Sonali.
Cyrus has been raised to think that his father is most likely either the
famous journalist and raconteur Lester Current (a kind of self-
mythologizing cross between a later day H.L. Mencken and Tom Wolfe),
or just possibly the local legend, the rebellious, mysterious, and absent
Quiet Bear. Obsessed with Current, Cyrus has read everything the man
has ever written and even has begun composing his own brief articles in
the manner of Current about his own friends, family and Stillwater County.
When Current returns to Stillwater County to confront the demons of his
youth and checks into the Dixie Court Motel, Cyrus, in turn, is able to
confront the legend of his maybe-father in the flesh. The man, as so
often seems to be the case, doesn't quite live up to the legend. When
Cyrus asks him whether he'd actually hunted moose with concussion
grenades and held a dying Israeli soldier in his arms, Current tells Cyrus
that he has "Applied my poetic license. Took some liberties with Madam
Hyperbole." When Cyrus asks how many embellishments have been
made, Current first tells him, "just a few details here and there," but finally
admits, "They sure add up fast over a lifetime."
Ultimately, the reader realizes that many of the novel's themes intersect in
Lester Current, and that the writer is in some ways more of a symbol than
a character. This is a novel about fathers: the father that Cyrus thinks
either Lester or Quiet Bear would be, on the one hand, and his surrogate
fathers in Patil and Moses Jefferson (the blind African American psychic)
on the other. Too, this is a novel about legends and myths, and the way
we use stories and folklore to create meaning and instill order on the
chaos that surrounds our lives. Even as Cyrus puts to rest some of his
own questions about his legacy and his past, he weaves new tales.
Ausherman takes chances in Fountains of Youth. So many novels set in
the south get so mired in the swamplands of formula and familiar tropes
that making use of those commonplace formulations in even postmodern,
subversive ways risks snap judgments on the parts of readers wearied by
the familiar. The romantic triangle between Cyrus and two of the Patil
sisters seems a bit obvious although the end of the novel takes some
turns that no one will see coming. And some of the articles by Current
and Cyrus inserted in the text throughout the novel tend to get a little
tedious and to slow the narrative's momentum. But through it all, Cyrus is
an engaging, likeable, and interesting narrator, and Ausherman paints
secondary characters like Patil, his daughter Mina, and Moses Jefferson
in subtle shades that reflect the full range of their humanity.
Fountains of Youth by Stephen Ausherman
Livingston Press,
ISBN: hardback 1-931982-55-4 ($25.00); paperback 1-931982-56-2
($14.95)
August 24, 2006
| Publishers Weekly Reviewed 2006-05-29 |
Aspiring writer Cyrus Slant, who has
"nearly outlived Jesus in years on earth,"
is a lifelong resident of the Dixie Court
Motel in Stillwater County, N.C., where
the supportive motel-owning South Asian
family, the Patils, coexist with a generous
smattering of caricatured rednecks.
Cyrus idolizes regionally famous
journalist Lester Current (a Southern
Garrison Keillor with a nearly
imperceptible gonzo edge), who, as
Cyrus's now-dead mother told him, is
also Cyrus's biological father. When
Current arrives in Stillwater County and
checks in at the Dixie Court Motel, it
looks like Cyrus will finally meet his idol-
father. Their first interaction is
uneventful, though it leads to a kind of
friendship that comes to an
abrupt end when Current-no stranger to
the bottle-abruptly vanishes.
No matter; Cyrus keeps busy gathering
stories from local residents, sneaking
into Current's motel room to file copy
under Current's byline and celebrating
Diwali ("kind of like Indian Christmas").
The world Ausherman conjures is a
colorful and quirky one, though the
charm on which this novel depends will
likely be lost on readers not already
enamored of the South.
"nearly outlived Jesus in years on earth,"
is a lifelong resident of the Dixie Court
Motel in Stillwater County, N.C., where
the supportive motel-owning South Asian
family, the Patils, coexist with a generous
smattering of caricatured rednecks.
Cyrus idolizes regionally famous
journalist Lester Current (a Southern
Garrison Keillor with a nearly
imperceptible gonzo edge), who, as
Cyrus's now-dead mother told him, is
also Cyrus's biological father. When
Current arrives in Stillwater County and
checks in at the Dixie Court Motel, it
looks like Cyrus will finally meet his idol-
father. Their first interaction is
uneventful, though it leads to a kind of
friendship that comes to an
abrupt end when Current-no stranger to
the bottle-abruptly vanishes.
No matter; Cyrus keeps busy gathering
stories from local residents, sneaking
into Current's motel room to file copy
under Current's byline and celebrating
Diwali ("kind of like Indian Christmas").
The world Ausherman conjures is a
colorful and quirky one, though the
charm on which this novel depends will
likely be lost on readers not already
enamored of the South.
Fountains of Youth
Ausherman, Stephen (Author)
ISBN: 1931982562
Livingston Press (AL)
Published 2006-06
Paperback, $14.95 (220p)
Fiction | General
Ausherman, Stephen (Author)
ISBN: 1931982562
Livingston Press (AL)
Published 2006-06
Paperback, $14.95 (220p)
Fiction | General
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