Lewis Nordan

The All-Girl Football Team

By Lewis "Buddy" Nordan

Published 1986

Contents

Sugar Among the Chickens – B

The Talker at the Freak-Show – B

Sugar, the Eunuchs, and Big G. B. – C

The Sears and Roebuck Catalog Game – B+

The Farmer’s Daughter – F

Wild Dog – B+

John Thomas Bird – D+

The Attendant –  C

The All-Girl Football Team – B+

The All-Girl Football Team

Nordan's stories are focused in the small town of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi and the majority of stories in this collection follow young people coming of age. Nordan's writing is a mix of down-to-earth, gritty realism and profoundly heightened drama. 

Critics say "The world that Lewis Nordan depicts has not fallen from grace; it has instead collapsed under the weight of it. His stories are ... 'dirty miracles.'" -- Fred Chapell, and it's hard to find a better way to put it. He writes about real people struggling with identity and perseverance in the face of difficulties ranging from insecurity, deep dissatisfaction with life, and pulling shit out of a disabled man. But he doesn't dwell too long on the dark or simply wallow in these difficult ideas; Nordan writes about beauty and optimism and overcoming. He explores the balance between discomfort and personal growth, and I think he finds a powerful balance

"Sugar Among the Chickens"

This may be the most representative story of this collection. It is the first in the book and works as a great introduction to Nordan's fictional town of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi. "I had been fishing for an hour and still hadn't caught anything. I was fishing for chickens," is how it begins; Nordan dives right into the absurdity. 

He writes in first person from the perspective of Sugar Mecklin, a young boy living on a farm with his parents, and he does a great job of capturing the boy's tone and thoughts and bringing him to life. Even the narration is written in a stylized rural diction

Nordan focuses the narrative on a boy's persistent efforts to catch a chicken-- more specifically, the aggressive rooster-- over the course of his childhood, into adolescence, but he lays a backdrop of troubled family life through memories and scenes along the way. He talks about his mother's dissatisfaction and her longing filled dreams of leaving the farm behind as well as his father's alcoholism. Sugar sees all this going on and "thought [he] could never get it worked." 

Nordan brings both conflicts to a head-- the external conflict of fishing for the rooster and the internal conflict of a young boy making sense of his family's dissatisfaction and uncertainty-- masterfully at the end when Sugar is attacked by the rooster. It lands on his head and attacks him, and in this chaos, Nordan does what he does best-- he makes it a beautiful moment.

Sugar wears the rooster like a crown and sees pride on his parents' faces and feels confident that he can make something of his life. He takes a huge, life-changing moment of victory out of this mundane (if not absurd) scene. 

"Wild Dog"

This is one of the few stories that doesn't take place specifically in Arrow Catcher. It does a lot of typical 'Nordan' things, but some other interesting techniques as well.

This story jumps out to third person, which not many of his stories do. It's also about an adult, which isn't very common in this collection. In third person, the story's diction is much more refined and proper than Sugar's point of view, though it still maintains a certain amount of conversationalism; he maintains his rural, colloquial vibes but is less stylized. 

Nordan tries out a technique in this one where there is no quotation marks. There's plenty of dialogue but none of it is within quotes. It reminded me a lot of Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses," and I think the technique worked as well here as it did in that book -- though Nordan did it first. It creates a very conversational, down to earth flow of dialogue. It takes away some of the weight of dialogue; it feels grounded and casual, which fits the whole farmer vibe he's going for.

Once again, Nordan uses internal and external conflict in tandem to great effect. The wild dogs parallel this couple's struggle to commit to staying on the farm or leaving, and their loss of hope in each other and strain on their marriage. The dogs being begrudgingly welcome on the farm, the couple coming to name and love the pups, and then watching them die helplessly, until they finally put them down.

The way he ends it-- the wife and husband saying I love you but then the wife asking "Why can't we stop saying this?" was so powerful, and talking about how they can't find the last dog, how they are closing this chapter but can't quite leave it behind... Nordan is a master of weaving internal and external conflict and it's easily my favorite thing about him as an author, and its part of why Wild Dog was one of my favorites.

"Farmer's Daughter"

This story seemed very out of place to me, even from the first line. I was so enjoying Nordan's style on my first read that I skipped this story entirely. It was the first story without Sugar as the narrator which was extremely jarring by itself, but also stylistically it was a break away. At first glance, it's daunting. The first paragraph was four pages, and much more wordy than the rest of the book. I may have enjoyed the story more in its own context, but it disrupted the flow of this collection for me and it wasn't nearly as engrossing as the others.

Here, he seems to be blending his southern style-- characters like Lovie Alice, Barfoot, Dixie Dawn, Uncle Billy, with talk of bears and the Confederacy-- with a little more heightened language and style, 

The others take you in from the first few lines. This one, I had to soldier through it. In all honesty, I don't have many other thoughts on it because I struggled to get through it. It's the only thing in this book that I did not enjoy at all. 

Links!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzwzzyPguV0

http://bookpage.com/interviews/8809-lewis-nordan#.Wc_E8LKGPIV

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/books/lewis-nordan-writer-who-spun-lyrical-tales-dies-at-72.html?mcubz=0

http://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/823-lewis-buddy-nordan

https://www.amazon.com/All-Girl-Football-Team-Lewis-Nordan/dp/0807113417