Jim Lewis: The King Is Dead

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

On one level, this is a story of love and love gone wrong, and how mistakes disrupt the years, smearing grubby fingerprints over ensuing generations.

On another, it's an intensely political novel with many of the obsessions of 20th-century America permeating the story. Race in particular proves a defining matter, political deal-making brings an odour of corruption and corruptibility, families rip and tear, bored suburban housewives discover illicit afternoon sex.

More than anything, The King is Dead reminded me of Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (and indeed, Eugenides' judgment of "marvellous" sits prominently on the cover of The King is Dead).

There is something similar about the way these two writers insist on the broad sweep of their country's history, at the same time as making breathtaking stories out of pretty unremarkable people - people who just want to get on and live ordinary lives, but are thwarted by human failing and the secret hand dealt by biology.

In Eugenides' case, this was the unseen gene of hermaphroditism. In Lewis' case, it's that our hero, Walter Selby, a World War II hero and political problem-solver to the Governor of Tennessee, is one-sixteenth black. This late-found knowledge slightly alters his view of the world and plays its part in the coming disaster.

Walter is married to Nicole, a Charleston belle, whom he loves perhaps more than someone should love another. She is less enraptured than he is, and that is the seed of tragedy - one of the saddest of old stories.

They have two children, Frank and Gail, and live in a leafy Memphis suburb, until Walter's world collapses and, in one action, he destroys his wife and effectively orphans his children.

The second half of the book tracks the lives of those children, told mostly through the experience of Frank, who grew up to be a fairly famous actor. Lacking his father's passion, it's late in the day that he finally becomes interested in his past and, Odysseus-like, goes in search of his father.

Lewis' idiosyncratic style grabs at his story, pulling up a scene here and a scene there, some of them seemingly unrelated to the overall narrative of Walter, Frank and co, and more to do with his insistence on those broader issues, and his interest in philosophy.

It all puts human existence very much in perspective, both as something and as nothing. Geology, he reminds us, tells us we're just a momentary blip; yet elsewhere, Lewis has Frank muse: "This politics, it was already forgotten; tell the story of the Ship of Love. Tell what shore it had wrecked itself against."

A sad and grubby tale; a grand and glorious story.

Flamingo, $24.99