The Great State of West Florida: A Novel
“Wascom’s vision, like a Flannery O’Connor story, comes like a bullet to the reader’s heart.”
Secessionist states? Civil war? Apocalyptic times? Trailer park massacres? Ring a few bells? In his disorienting, dizzying, compelling new novel, Kent Wascom rings those bells and brings to life an assortment of contemporary nightmares along the way. The Great State of West Florida is the final volume in Wascom’s darkly funny family drama of the Woolsacks of the Gulf Coast of a United States that is both familiar and otherworldly.
Wascom’s real/imagined landscape of West Florida—both a physical “state” and a state of mind—suggests itself as a metaphor for twisted yearning, for confused aspiration, for the kind of violent upheavals that seem an inevitable part of the world right now. West Florida is the kind of place that people escape from and run to—“Because that’s exactly what West Florida is, something in you. People call West Florida a dream like that’s supposed to be some kind of insult, like this place is no place at all but borderless, a vessel for us fucked-up people to pour our hopes and hang-ups into. But if this place that’s not a place can be anything to anyone, then nothing can stop it from being real, and its borders can light up like neon in the sunset of any needful heart.”
The locus of Wascom’s imagination is the South of crawfish boils, cornhole games, papaws and meemaws, Bubba kegs, propane tanks, assault rifles, Christian nationalists, and enough “motherfuckers” to fill Daytona International Speedway, twice over, and the story he creates in The Great State of Florida reads like Metallica, Judas Priest, and Black Sabbath meet J. D. Salinger, Anthony Burgess, and Quentin Tarrantino.
The Great State of West Florida has a cinematic drive to it, cutting from one tragicomic scene to another with a breathless and brutal eloquence. Wascom’s West Florida turns into a savage piece of metonymy, its sun-drenched landscape standing in for a divided and discordant 21st century America at large—“And for their hate they were hated in turn, because this country loves to hate.”
The Woolsack family is a mesmerizing mess, and the 13-year-old Rally, the surviving Huck Finn of the clan, sees his family’s story connected to the roads he travels on—“Like our family and the state itself, Highway 98 is half beauty and half horror.” That sentence could describe the book as a whole, a narrative filled with beauty and horror.
The story opens when Rally is a baby and his mother, a gunslinging virago, massacres his entire family. He is left with his Uncle Rodney, a professional gunfighter; Destiny, his cryptic cousin; and the elusive Governor, his mother.
Wascom’s talent will remind many readers of a variegated and venerable line of writers—William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Harry Crews, S. A. Cosby—all in the main vein of the modern Southern gothic tradition. Other readers, perhaps, will see the shadow of Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange in The Great State of West Florida. Wascom’s writing is always sharp, clear, and inventive. His characters come across as both familiar and startling. The broken bones and bullet holes that punctuate his narrative make for a wildly violent but eerily recognizable landscape. The tune of this punk rock War and Peace will not be for everyone, but any reader who pays attention to the lyrics that come through the sounds of bullets and crushed cartilage will hear something worth remembering.
Wascom’s imagined apocalypse in West Florida is both surreal and all too real. “Nothing but bodies and blackened siding, shreds of Tyvek carried by the updraft and sent like whirling dust devils across our path.” Wascom’s vision, like a Flannery O’Connor story, comes like a bullet to the reader’s heart.