“At 57 years old, I said to myself: ‘Pritchard, you always thought you were going to write a big beautiful book about the South. You might not. So what are you going to do?’ Well, I thought, don’t write a big beautiful book about the South. Write a small, not so beautiful book.”
So that’s what Memphian John Pritchard did, and he called it Junior Ray, after its narrator, Junior Ray Loveblood, a foul-mouthed deputy sheriff in the Mississippi Delta.
Writer William Gay called the novel “darkly comic, profound, and original.” One reviewer wrote that Pritchard had “taken profanity and made a new language of it.” And writer Harry Crews went one better: “Underneath this violent language and narrative, there is a sweet truth.”
And there was more: public reaction to Junior Ray’s low-base high jinks. The book made the Barnes & Noble Top Ten Sensational Debut Novels list in 2005.
Now Junior Ray’s back in The Yazoo Blues (NewSouth Books), and this time he’s working the parking lot at a Tunica casino. But he’s reaching back into history too: to a failed Union expedition into the Yazoo River pass. But his free time’s well spent inside the Magic Pussy Cabaret & Club up in “Meffis.”
In Meffis, on Thursday: Pritchard’s reading from and signing copies of The Yazoo Blues at Burke’s on Thursday, but don’t count on cussin’. The author knows the written word’s one thing; the spoken word is another. According to Pritchard: “I am not reading those words aloud. Even I don’t wanna hear ’em. I’m not being true to my art? Well, then … okay … I’m not!”
John Pritchard reading from and signing “The Yazoo Blues,” Burke’s Book Store, Thursday, November 13th, 5:30-7 p.m. For more information, call Burke’s at 278-7484.