Charlie Smith is an accomplished and critically lauded American poet and novelist. His works, which include several novels and collections of poetry, have been noted by critics for their lyrical intensity and mesmerizing characters. The son of an established Georgian clan, Smith spent a few debauched years in New York City after earning a degree from Duke University. He attended the prestigious writing program at the University of Iowa and was a contributor to literary journals prior to writing his first novel, Canaan.

Smith's works are typically set in deteriorated Southern landscapes populated by dissipated characters and eccentric families. Publishers Weekly contributor Wendy Smith described Smith's body of work as "notable for the author's—and his characters'—fearless willingness to plunge into extreme situations and primal emotions." Smith himself stated in the same article that his characters are "people who do exactly what they want to do; they see the gloriousness of being alive and the horror of it at the same time, and they drive through those things because they want to have more life."

Canaan is the tale of a Southern heiress who refuses to follow any rules save her own. A scion of a wealthy Southern family, Elizabeth Bonnet Burdette marries one of her own kind, J. C. Burdette, in Hawaii during World War II. Willful and tempestuous, she remains behind after the war with their small son and has numerous love affairs. The novel begins with her return to the eccentric Burdette clan's ancestral home, a large estate bestowed with the symbolic name of Canaan. Elizabeth's clashes with her conventional husband—along with her rabid and indiscriminate sexual conquests—set the stage for the novel's theme of confrontation between old and new traditions. Her outrageous behavior encompasses seducing her son, sleeping with her best friend, attempting to drown her sister-in-law, and setting fire to the family mansion. The skirmishes force the characters to face both the limitations placed on them by their background and those which they have set upon themselves.

Canaan received widespread attention for a first novel. Most critics praised Smith's talent for evoking the novel's turbulent action in superb prose, but they also criticized the heroine's overblown characterization. Washington Post Book World reviewer Bruce VanWyngarden commented on this shortcoming, stating that Elizabeth "works better as metaphor than character," but he praised Smith's capacity to create other characters that "jangle with originality." New York Times Book Review critic Carol Verderese noted that "Smith's prose, which can be lyrical and buoyant, becomes overwrought and hyperbolic as Elizabeth takes command." Writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Dick Rorabeck lauded Smith's inaugural effort, describing it as "a remarkable first novel of elusive but elemental force."

Smith followed Canaan with his collection of poetry, Red Roads, which deals with his Southern heritage and family relationships, and a second novel, Shine Hawk. Smith again sets his characters within a Southern landscape teeming with melodrama in Shine Hawk. Its narrator, Billy Crew, has escaped his rural Georgia past to achieve minor recognition as a painter in New York City. He returns to his swampy homeland to encounter Hazel, an old lover whose memory continues to haunt him; she is now married to Crew's former best friend, Frank Jackson. Crew enters the scene as the distraught Frank is traumatized by his brother Jake's death, for which he believes he might be responsible. The trio begin a journey to remove Jake's body from a trailer park, loading it onto a pickup truck in order to bury it at the family's homestead. Their travels with the rotting corpse, as told by Crew in flashback, form the crux of the narrative. Crew's voice also serves as a medium for the author's descriptive style, as Crew reflects upon his life in New York, his failed marriage, a longing for Hazel, and his friends' sordid family saga.

Shine Hawk received a mixed, but often positive, critical reception. In the New York Review of Books, Robert Towers faulted what he perceived as the work's overabundance of gory Gothic-novel imagery and suggested that the story might have been better served by revealing some background on the motivations that drove the book's characters. However, Towers praised Smith's gift of descriptive writing, such as "the cadenced sentences that celebrate the landscape," further commending the novelist's description of the Southern locales as "physical images [that] are brilliantly precise and evocative." In an appraisal of the novel for the New York Times Book Review, Lorrie Moore described it as a contemporary Southern literary example of "appalling brilliance," finding that "the characters [have] lives that both repel and impress." She concluded by stating that "one feels everywhere in the novel a life and imagination laid down fully and at risk, as if it were the major literary effort—as perhaps it is—of someone terribly gifted and cursed."

In his novel The Lives of the Dead, Smith develops a creative male protagonist nearing middle age who is embarking on a journey. The dissipated South and its past and present riches also play a role in the plot structure. The hero of this work, cult filmmaker Buddy Drake, travels to the Gulf Coast of Florida to scout locations for his latest film venture, while simultaneously attempting to wheedle money to finance it from his wealthy ex-wife. Drake is accompanied on his travels by the trio of characters of the unmade movie in his head: a disturbing serial killer by the name of D'Nel Boyd, the bewitching Molly, and the passive dolphin trainer, Banty. The focus of The Lives of the Dead is the interplay between reality and fiction in the increasingly troubled mind of Drake, as the lines between the film's serial killings and Drake's past and future actions begin to blur. Smith again weaves the tale with lush and descriptive prose. Los Angeles Times critic Richard Eder described it as a "garish, gory and chokingly overwrought novel . . . an airless world of helpless evil." Writing in Washington Post Book World, reviewer James Hynes praised Smith's Faulknerian use of verbiage to set the stage for the novel's mood, calling it "a harrowing, passionate, powerfully written and unflinchingly honest book."

Smith's command of language, as praised by critics, is a useful tool for his poetry. However, his second volume of verse, Indistinguishable from the Darkness, received less attention than his startling novels. A collection of three novellas, Crystal River, was originally written long before his success as an author and not published in full until 1991. The trio of pieces in Crystal River have certain similarities, while differing in length. Each story revolves around two close men that are either brothers or bonded by a quasi-homosexual brotherly love. They all embark upon a search for answers to questions about their past that deeply trouble them. Their journeys involve large bodies of water, and they meet with a fearsome and fearless woman who plays by her own set of rules. The element of time, playing a decisive role in the drama of the characters' lives and also in their quest for answers, is a strong element of the three stories. In the title novella, two Southern "good old boys," who are romantically involved with one another, take a canoe trip that leads them to a naked woman who forces them into sexual acts at gunpoint. In "Storyville," failed lawyer Harry Bates, long overshadowed by his successful twin brother and bewildered by his father's disappearance years before, links up with the very unstable Laura Dell. The two run off to New Orleans, where they aim in part to steal a baby to replace the one Laura has miscarried, a loss that drove her husband to commit suicide.

Crystal River was well received by critics, who again praised Smith's lyrical fluidity. Madison Smartt Bell, reviewing the work for Washington Post Book World, lauded Smith's writing for "his amazingly powerful, convincing, and beautiful prose style," and noted that this "masterful prose . . . renders the natural world and the human response to it with equal conviction, and makes the characters believable even when their behavior seems improbable and absurd." Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Jill McCorkle favorably remarked on the continuity behind the three novellas, and observed that "Smith's elegant and lyrical prose is constant as well, his sentences lifting the reader to great heights and then descending to the lowest of lows."

Smith's next work was a third collection of poetry, The Palms. This work again draws on the author's own background and matters of trust, betrayal, and gore, with all these elements structured in the form of lengthy and entangling sentences.

Smith set his fifth novel, Chimney Rock, in Hollywood, California. Protagonist Will Blake shares many similarities with other lead characters in Smith's previous novels. He is at a crossroads in his life, does not have a full grasp on reality, and is enmeshed in a long and turbulent family history. As in prior works, the narrative of Chimney Rock is woven around a particularly melodramatic family and ends with another mansion going up in flames—this one during the frenzied 1992 Los Angeles riot. Smith stated in a Publishers Weekly interview that he considered Chimney Rock to be the final part of "a kind of spiritual trilogy," one that began with Shine Hawk and continued with The Lives of the Dead. Smith mused that "they are books about people headed out energetically into the world, surrendering and charming their way into the heart of things."

In Smith's poetry collection Before and After: Poems, his "skills as a novelist show in a powerful series of poems about one family," attested Elizabeth Gunderson in Booklist. The collection "winds across recognizable terrain: the family house and business, breakdowns and heart attacks, divorces and new spouses," wrote a Publishers Weekly critic. The collection was received by many critics with enthusiasm. Though a critic for Publishers Weekly faulted the collection's longest poem, "At Five in the Afternoon," as the weakest in the work, the critic nonetheless called the verse a "glittering, forceful collection." Gunderson, on the other hand, concluded, "Each of these short and stunning poems secures Smith's place as one of the most original and captivating voices on the current scene."

The novel Cheap Ticket to Heaven follows Jack Baker and his wife, Clare Manigault, as they go on a crime and killing spree across America. The novel received mixed reviews from critics. A Publishers Weekly critic, though calling Smith a "dazzlingly lyrical prose stylist" who "can render beauty from even the most mundane description," nonetheless faulted the story as "bloated." Critic Nancy Pearl disagreed. Describing reading the novel in Booklist as "akin to watching someone slit a wrist with a diamond—a dreadful act done with such style and beauty that you continue watching despite the horror of it," Pearl concluded that readers who could stomach the story would "probably not find a better book in 1996."

Smith's poetry collection, Heroin and Other Poems, was enthusiastically received by many critics. A Publishers Weekly contributor described the work as exploring a combination of "self-loathing confessionalism (the most dominant mode here) with highly charged metaphoric evocations . . . and an obsession with the nature of change." A Kirkus Reviews critic found that the poems painted a world where "passion always does dwindle, and most of these poems are written in the low tide of love, when ecstasy has given way to disenchantment and self-accusation." A critic for Publishers Weekly argued that, with Heroin and Other Poems, Smith has proved himself able to write in a "neo-Ashberian urban sophisticate mode" in addition to his Southern, "rural roots" narration and that this gives this "winning" collection "further range and perspective."

January 2002

From this Issue

poetry-magazineEastern Forests

poetry-magazineTenderness and Rot

poetry-magazineA Bird in County Clare

Table of Contents

Eastern Forests

Tenderness and Rot

A Bird in County Clare