Hunk City, by James Wilcox

James Wilcox is a fine novelist whose books deserve a wide and appreciative audience.

In Modern Baptists Wilcox explored the lives of Southern small-town characters who at first seemed two-dimensional stereotypes. Gradually, as the novel developed, they emerged as three-dimensional human beings who suffer the same problems and neuroses as other inhabitants of the modern world. The protagonist of Modern Baptists, Bobby Carl Pickens, was in my mind the equal of Updike’s Rabbit in this regard. In Hunk City, his most recent novel, Wilcox revives these characters and examines their affairs 25 years later. In his early 60s, Bobby Pickens is now the superintendant of sanitation in the small town of Tula Springs, though midway through the novel he is impeached and removed from office. Burma LaSteele still loves Bobby, but her love remains unrequited. Before the novel begins, she was briefly married to an elderly man who won the lottery and then died, leaving her a rich widow. She lives in a giant replica of the Presley mansion Graceland outside of Tula Springs. Burma is still doing her best to champion liberal causes, never fully understanding what she champions. Her mother, now 88, is as vital as ever, still concerned with finding a husband for her sixtyish daughter. The lawyer Donna Lee Keely remains devoted in all her ineffectual ways to various progressive and liberal causes. Wilcox introduces several new characters, most notably Iman, a large young black woman with five or six children who has devoted herself to a cult of chastity in a semi-Catholic sect.

Burma LaStreele is the protagonist of Hunk City. She faces numerous challenges and ordeals: from her mother’s meddling, the born-again Christian who erects a large cross on her property and who sues her after contracting an amoebic infection from a broken sewer, the libidinous judge whom her mother tries to set her up with, her gay supervisor whom she falls in love with, to her always failing efforts to win Bobbie Pickens’ attention, to her efforts to rid herself of the burden of Graceland II.

I enjoyed reading this book but it it never moves beyond the two-dimensional. Although Burma is recognizable from her appearances in the earlier novels, Bobby is not. He is difficult to like or sympathize with or even to find interesting. The novel is full of one-liners, jabs against Republicans, conservatives, gay-bashers, provincials, and so on, but these never weave themselves into a more substantial narrative. There is much humor in Hunk City, but it’s never as effective or incisive as Modern Baptists or North Gladiola or Miss Undine’s Living Room. This new novel lacks depth—it’s all a comic, slapstick surface. We never develop the empathy for the characters in this novel as we did in Wilcox’s earlier novels. His characters constantly undercut and betray themselves. This is what I like about them. It’s one of the major ways in which they show their humanity. Unfortunately, in Hunk City, they rarely seem more than stereotypical, one-dimensional lampoons, and the novel generally falls flat.