Look What Washed Up

The cover blurb of LSU Press’ recent re-release of E. P. O’Donnell’s 1941 novel The Great Big Doorstep describes it as a literary and cultural classic, which strikes me as ambitious: I didn’t know about this novel until I got hold of a review copy; and while I don’t claim to have read every classic, I have gone to enough school to have heard of most of them. But I will go all in with LSU on agreeing that this book should be a classic. This comic examination of human nature, this assemblage of weird events smoothed together into a novel by a deft narrative hand, deserves to be considered the rural counterpart to A Confederacy of Dunces.

The Crochet family lives in Grass Margin, Louisiana, a strip of riverside community between the Mississippi and nowhere—for reference, they have to go to Venice for fun. Desperately poor, they watch the river for resources and entertainment: the daughters are cautioned not to wave at foreign sailors (advice they ignore), while too-ripe bananas thrown overboard by a ship delayed by quarantine provide a celebrated windfall. The highlight of the Crochet’s salvaged treasure is what Mrs. Crochet calls “the doorsteps,” a big set of steps carved from cypress and assumed to have come from an upstream plantation collapsing into the river. The Crochets place it against their rented house, being careful not to actually attach it, since that would make it part of the house and make it the landlord’s property.

The father, Commodo, is determined to find a house worthy of the doorsteps to move his family into, an ambition greeted with varying levels of sighing and cynicism from the rest of his family. He finds the perfect house, which is being seized for back taxes; if the Crochets can come up with $60 to redeem it, it’s theirs, provided they can do so before the water level in the Mississippi drops. At that point, a notoriously acquisitive local politician will return from taking his cattle to higher ground and will snap it up. The Crochets’ increasingly desperate attempts to come up with this money (about $1,000 in 2015 dollars, according to the unimpeachable source “some website I found”) make up the action of the book.

I ruined this book dog-earing every other page. O’Donnell has a truly awe-inspiring control of his characters’ voices, which is especially impressive in light of the fact that they all have essentially the same thick South Louisiana accent. I expected to find this exhausting because most writing in dialect is bad, but O’Donnell more than pulls it off. In a tour-de-force scene in the second half of the book, Mrs. Crochet, whose speech is the most French-inflected, enjoys some sherry while cooking court bouillon. Her resulting slide into dramatic franglais is nothing short of majestic—you can imagine O’Donnell saying all this aloud at his desk, maybe after a couple of drinks himself, to capture the most natural rhythm. Even O’Donnell’s casual lines ring with authenticity, as when Mrs. Crochet adapts the Gospel in order to teach good manners: “Never tell people your business. Jesus never tole nobody his business.”

As finely drawn and as vivid as all the characters are—pie-in-the-sky Commodo, sour Topal, annoyed-but-loving Mrs. Crochet—the star of the show is Evvie, the Crochets' younger daughter. In her early teens during the events of the novel, Evvie is one of the most clearly and convincingly depicted characters I’ve ever seen in fiction. Innocent of the facts of life and destined (according to her mother) for the convent, Evvie’s goal is to have a lover, in the limited way she understands the concept, to renounce before she enters the convent. That will make the sacrifice greater and imbue the whole experience with teenager-pleasing drama. Smart and pretty, she has no trouble getting male attention; but none of her potential suitors quite fit the bill. Her squirreled-away underarm deodorant, used only on special occasions, is a hilarious and heartbreaking expression of the fragile vanity of the young and the unimaginable-two-generations-later poverty of the deepest crannies of the South.

There’s so much in this book I wish I had room to write about. The descriptions of the human and natural worlds around the river are so lush and full you find yourself slapping away imagined mosquitoes. A subplot involves stolen royalties from a song called “The Chilblain Stomp,” which sounds exactly like it could be the name of one of those forgotten blues classics that flared up locally before the advent of national radio. O’Donnell is also the only author I’ve ever seen actually write down the word “jounce,” which people say but for some reason don’t write. (It describes the way something bounces from being disturbed. If you put something in the back of a truck and drive over a rough road, the cargo will jounce.) Don’t let this strange, overlooked gem of a book float past you. Reach out and haul it in.