OU prof's novel captures a time, a place and its voices

There's so much to delight a reader in local author Jack Matthews' new novel, "The Gambler's Nephew," it's hard to know where to start. Probably with the prose, which Matthews writes with easy, lyrical grace and a bulls-eye wit.

"It's music," Matthews says of his approach to the written word. "All of the properties of music apply to language." This book has almost no exposition filler; just about every sentence seems to have gotten some loving care and attention.

"The sentence is the living cell of prose," Matthews says, which is a nice metaphor – though I thought his editor at Etruscan Press said something better. "They don't make sentences like (his) any more," she told me.

Matthews, who lives outside of Athens, taught in OU's English Department for many years. The distinguished professor emeritus of English has written more than 20 books, including the novels "Sassafras" and "Hangar Stout, Awake!"

The author's latest novel is set in the Ohio/West Virginia region in the period just before and after the Civil War. Whether people in that time and place actually talked the way Matthews' narrator and characters do, I'm not qualified to say – but I surely hope they did.

One character, spongeing off the hospitality of his wealthy brother, is "as content as a cat in a butter churn." Another comes back from his adventures out West behaving "as odd as a rooster in trousers."

There's also a precision of homely and sensual detail in the book that does a reader's heart and ears good. When the wife of a main character dies, she's buried in "an expensive coffin made of polished wild cherry inlaid with pale butternut." A man fights off sleepiness because he's just eaten "a substantial noontime dinner of pork chops, fried chicken, succotash, candied yams, stewed beets, green onions in vinegar, and hot buttered cornbread muffins." This is a touchable, smellable place, with real food, and furniture you can sit on.

The plot of the book defies synopsis. It starts with a wealthy merchant, Nehemiah Dawes, who lives in an Ohio River town, and who is obsessed with two causes – abolishing slavery and ending the practice of grave-robbing, by which medical students of the day obtain cadavers for dissection. He drives his neighbors to distraction with his endless ranting on these topics.

One day Dawes sees what he believes are two bounty hunters rowing in a boat on the Ohio, who appear to be transporting a captured slave back down South. He calls for his rifle to shoot them, but kills the young slave instead. As atonement, he buries the young man in a family grave, thus enraging the relatives of his late wife, who was buried in a less attractive site - closer to the Ohio's flood line.

As the story progresses, we learn more about the escaped slave; his master (who is also his father); Dawes' scapegrace brother Isaac, who lives off his brother's hospitality for a time, but who is transformed after Nehemiah's death by reading his diary; and a host of other characters.

Half the pleasure in the book comes from its resemblance to a huge, shuffling, shaggy-dog story. Every time a new character comes on stage, the narrator - whose identity we don't learn until the end - wanders off to talk at length about the new person's history, quirks and kin. He later circles back to the main plot - now a little askew from where we thought it was heading originally. Later on, we learn that the silly, apparently offhand information imparted earlier is important.

Matthews looks at his people with a clear and merciless eye, laying out all the pettiness, greed and self-absorption that humans are prone to, but he does it without a hint of rancor, and more than a little affection - jaundiced and cynical affection, but real nonetheless.

He tries to let his characters have it out among themselves, without coming down on anyone's side, or imposing some ultimate author's truth. He cites the notion of men-de from classic Greek rhetoric (he has degrees in English Literature and Classical Greek) - which seems to mean something like, "one the one hand - but on the other hand" The idea, he suggests, is that nobody in the human world has the whole truth, and those who think they do – even if, like Nehemiah Dawes, they're generally on the right side – end up crazy and mean.

"The most stupid character in (the Odyssey) is Polyphemus," Matthews says – he being the one-eyed Cyclops who gets so badly tricked by Odysseus. Polyphemus' stupidity, Matthews suggests, stems from the fact that he's one-eyed - he can't see things from more than one perspective.

The vision of "The Gambler's Nephew" is deeply conservative, in the best sense of that massively abused word. In the end, the narrator - who, like Matthews himself, has surrounded himself with great piles of books finds solace in his library, "in spite of the general cussedness of the human species These old authors lived and suffered, but in their language they attained to something like timelessness and some humble, mortal version of immortality." Sounds like a plan.