Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 27, 1995 TAG: 9508250125
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: F5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY ROBERT HILLDRUP
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
\ The promise is there in this novel about the Richmond of 50 years ago, but the delivery is not, and in that sense, the question continues: What has happened to the powerful regional novels of Virginia and the South that used to mark so much of American letters?
Hazelgrove, a native of Richmond now living in Chicago, tells of a transitional time some of us remember well - World War II and its end and, more specifically, the first faint stirrings of the winds of social and racial change.
This story is told largely through the eyes of Lee Hartwell, a junior high schooler who watches older siblings and their friends return from the war, and sees also the impact on the survivors of those who died.
Lee's father, Burke Hartwell, is a lawyer and campaign manager for a thinly disguised apple-growing Senator (Harry F. Byrd) who waves the flags of race and labor unions as threats to the "Virginia way of life."
But some of the senator's supporters go too far, framing one of Burke Hartwell's maids for theft in an attempt to strike at union organizers. It is thin stuff, one of the weakest ingredients of a weak novel. Hartwell, blinded by a stroke, resigns from the senator's campaign to defend his colored servant, and young Lee bursts into the courtroom at the last moment with key evidence.
The fact that this climactic turn of events seems strong is evidence, I fear, of just how weak the rest of the story is.
Where the book is at its best in the subtleties which some of us recall, and which younger generations no doubt find hard to believe: the rigid class structure of Southern society and the terrible penalties that were exacted for violations.
Hazelgrove shifts point of view too often to make his novel strong; he uses slang that didn't exist in the South in 1945; his title is a total misnomer because the few references to tobacco have nothing at all to do with the story.
Yet when one considers the absolute dearth of good Southern novels, particularly those about Virginia, perhaps Hazelgrove is just snakebit by the times. William Styron's early work was never equalled. William Hoffman, though probably deserving better, wound up the same. Garrett Epps' "The Shad Treatment," now some 20 years old, showed flashes of prominence and then nothing else.
Even the work of non-Virginians such as Harry Crews, Barry Hannah and Willie Morris, probably the best Southern writers of recent decades, has faded.
"Tobacco Sticks" is thus little more than a flawed remembrance for those of us who remember the ancients who recalled the Civil War, and the time when segregation was perceived, by whites, as both the natural order and a burden of obligation.
What "Tobacco Sticks" is really saying, however, and without doing it very well, is something that biologists are well aware of. And that is that no species remains the same, even the white patricians of Richmond. Like all the rest of the animal kingdom, they too have to adapt, migrate or die.
As to the novels of Virginia and the South, one can only conclude that the homogenization of a people and a land once aware of the past has destroyed not only value, but perspective, and without these no novel can ever succeed.
Robert Hilldrup is a Richmond writer and former newspaperman.
by CNB