TO SHILL A MOCKINGBIRD
A BOOK REVIEW OF AUGUSTA TROBAUGH’S "SOPHIE AND THE RISING SUN"
• ALEX GRANT.

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I would bet my bottom dollar that 100,000 monkeys pounding away at 100,000 word-processors for 10,000 years would never produce as pitiful and prolix a parody of the Deep South school of literature – Truman Capote {The Grass Harp},Carson McCullers {Reflections in a Golden Eye},Flannery O’Connor {Wise Blood} – as Augusta Trobaugh’s SOPHIE AND THE RISING SUN unleashed upon an unsuspecting public as a Penguin/Plume softcover last month at $19.00.

I freely admit that I too am prone towards abstruse alliteration that can induce apoplexy in the reader but this sentence from Sophie takes the ( fruit ) –cake : "He waited and weeded and wondered what she would be wearing and where she would be going".
Those simian scribblers referred to above would all have to be two Purdy shotguns short of a safari to pen such a penny-ante phrase. Sophie came to my attention due to its era, 1939 and its theme, anti-Japanese feelings running high in the wake of Pearl Harbour; said features being akin to those of Martin Cruz Smith’s December 6 already reviewed here.

A prim bruised Georgia Peach spinster and an ageing prissy Japanese-American gardener form a scandalous liaison in the corn-pone kudzu-coated Southern hamlet of Salty Creek, Georgia.
A bulging cracker-barrel crammed with hand-whittled Confederacy homilies could never entirely convey the crassly conceived would-be tragic-comedy that stutters effortfully from the purplish-prosed pen of Ms Trobaugh – surely a pseudonym.!

I almost died laughing every second page. Had Sophie been formulated as a demure "get your cotton-pickin’ hands off of me" bodice-ripper or a half-assed Harlequin Romance it might have eluded the thoroughgoing trashing that is soundly deserves. In an alternate universe this slender volume would earn a pseudo Pulitzer Prize for pedantry and pusillanimity. And for plucking featherless a literary mockingbird – Harper Lee’s classic novel of 1962 does not deserve this ridiculous revamping.

© Alex Grant November 2002

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