Boy With Loaded Gun: A Memoir
by Lewis NordanAlgonquin, 290 pp., $23.95
One of the most basic reasons to read a memoir is to draw strength from the story of another person’s life — how the writer has gotten through his trials, borne his woes, made use of his gifts (or borne his gifts and made use of his woes, perhaps). I think this was certainly the intention of the genre’s inventor, Saint Augustine. In the age of Oprah, we may think of intimate autobiography as inviting prurient interest, literary rubbernecking, or schadenfreude — but when offered and received with an open heart, true confessions can be a serious source of spiritual nutrition.
In this light, Lewis Nordan’s Boy With Loaded Gun is one square meal. The boy who loses his father, the father who loses his boy, the deceiver, the self-deceived: Nordan has been all of them. A life of such challenges and errors, told honestly and with insight, is well worth hearing about. To wit: This book contains chapters called “The Man I Killed” and “The Amazing Technicolor Effing Machine” and each delivers quite literally on its title.
I first became acquainted with Nordan’s work through his book Wolf Whistle, a fictionalized account of the case of Emmett Till, a 15-year-old black boy who was tortured and drowned for the crime of whistling at a white woman. This happened a couple of miles from Nordan’s hometown of Itta Bena, Mississippi, and is discussed from a personal point of view in the memoir, as are many other autobiographical elements in his fiction.
I remember being stunned by Wolf Whistle — by the writing and by the depth of inquiry. These qualities also grace the memoir, Nordan’s first work of nonfiction after seven novels. The man can express himself with an unfussiness and directness that is disarming, but has access as well to uncommonly exciting and poetic levels of language when required for description or introspection. I appreciate a writer who uses but doesn’t overuse his rhetorical bag of tricks — Nordan has an enviable sense of pacing and discretion.
And he has lived quite a life. His story opens with an engaging evocation of itty-bitty Itta Bena, followed by his father’s early death and his mother’s remarriage. Small matters, such as his first experiences watching television, receive careful attention as well. “Expectation of programming had not yet entered our intellectual purview. Content was unimportant. We watched the set. The idea of a picture appearing there before us was far more interesting than anything we might actually see on the screen, and so no one cared what the program at any given time might happen to be.”
The weirdness kicks in quickly, with a visit to town by a very, very unusual ex-girlfriend of his stepfather’s that is handled in a way just as unusual by his parents. Soon after comes the eponymous loaded gun, which young “Buddy” orders from a catalog, and whose presence in the Nordan home occasions a near-catastrophe. “A Body in the River” (the Emmett Till chapter) and the succeeding section, “New York City,” explore the ways life both does and doesn’t become art. “That’s why I like fiction better than autobiography,” Nordan confesses, examining a particularly telling moment in his Gotham adventure. “Fiction has that built-in obligation of irony and its riches. — I’m saying that in life whatever happens, really and truly, is in fiction always transformed, the possibility of grace for its characters is never lost. And I live my life today, as I did then, in the hope of finding real transcendence, after the manner of fictional characters, though I understand the danger of such hope.”
Subsequent chapters tell the story of Nordan’s early, long, and ill-starred first marriage, his sleazy, depressing affair with a hippie girl (his wife’s study buddy), a near-catastrophe involving their oldest son, followed by their stillborn second child and angelic third. We meet one of the worst houseguests in literary history, follow Nordan’s gradual descent into, and ultimate redemption from, alcoholism, and watch him deal with the shattering effects of his son’s death. Never content to be an innocent victim, Nordan cheats on his second wife too. It’s amazing. When life doesn’t screw him, he screws himself, and then time and again has the strength to pick himself up and go on. I wish this pattern didn’t sound so damned familiar.
On the occasion of one last near-catastrophe comes a soliloquy so powerful and true that I considered quoting it for the whole 800 words of this review. Just two sentences, though: “I wept for what I had lost, for my fathers, for my sons, for Elizabeth, for Annie whom I threw away once and had seemed ready to throw away again, my God. — I wept for everyone, for all the madness in the world, for murderers, for suicides, for divorce, for fathers and sons, and for that reckless stunted creature, that sickness inside myself, that put into jeopardy the fragile souls of those most dear to me, and allowed me to call my actions by the holy name of love.”
For a book to be so amusing and to contain such pain is rare and moving.
This article appears in March 3 • 2000.