Book Review

Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels

True love never dies. It just gets cooler, in every sense, icing up under the dueling infirmities of age and memory like an overworked and sweating air conditioner propped haphazardly in the paint-peeling window of one of those random, boxy shotgun shacks that dot the miles of nowheresville leading into the parish of Orleans. There are precious few literary landscapes where this particular sort of true romance burns as hot and sweet and altogether cool as in Gifford’s sprawling, epically Southern gothic novels featuring lanky ex-con Sailor Ripley and his beloved blond muse of the Deep South’s bloody two-lane blacktop, Lula Pace Fortune. Initially on the lam from Marietta, Lula’s crazed harridan of a mother, and her deep-fried lover-cum-detective, Johnnie Farragut, Sailor kicked off his seven-story history with Lula in 1990 with Wild at Heart, as near a modern masterpiece of down-and-out-of-this-world passion as Flannery O’Connor never got around to writing. After David Lynch adapted that book for film and it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes that same year, Gifford embarked on a glorious neo-noir writing jag that ultimately resulted in six more Sailor and Lula novels: Perdita Durango (also adapted for film, by the appropriately surreal Spanish auteur Álex de la Iglesia), Sailor’s Holiday, Sultans of Africa, Consuelo’s Kiss, Bad Day for the Leopard Man, and the series’ lovely, melancholy capstone, The Imagination of the Heart. Read in sequence, Gifford’s novels/novellas (all but the first two clock in at less than 100 pages) are a pulpy, meridianal meditation on love and death in the dirty South, hugely entertaining and often frenzied in their depiction of Sailor and Lula’s misadventures into random, swampy chaos but also written in the kind of watertight, blunt-edged prose that recalls Jim Thompson filtered through some awesomely hyper-Americanized hybrid of Fellini and Katherine Dunn. And considering the current, all-too-real hell in the Gulf, where the befouled water itself is spontaneously bursting into green flame sans Lynchian special effects, there may be no better summer than this to revisit (or discover) Sailor and Lula, Perdita and Romeo, and Gifford’s own unique and unmistakable patois of the heart, which is wild, and the world, which is, as Lula notes, “weird on top” and gets more so with every passing moment. Too cool.

This article appears in June 18 • 2010.