[In the following excerpt, Sullivan commends Hoffman's prose style but finds Godfires to be a reprise of well-worn views and attitudes about the contemporary American South.]

The three novels discussed here are all more or less southern, but otherwise they are about as different as they could be. The hero of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, from which I take my title, is born in Tennessee, but the action of the novel occurs in the American West. Lewis Green's The Silence of Snakes is set in the mountains of North Carolina between the world wars, and its themes are traditionally southern. William Hoffman’s novel, [Godfires,] laid in rural Virginia with occasional incursions into Richmond, engages the ambiguities of the modern South.

In one of its dimensions Godfires is a novel of detection. Billy Payne, the commonwealth’s attorney in Howell County, Virginia, is a man on the skids at thirty-five, a failed yuppie who is likely to be out of work after the next election. His quotidian life moves from his office, where the local preachers urge him to suppress pornography and to discover and prosecute juveniles who make love in the byways, to his home, where he lives with his father in drunken acrimony equally shared. Billy’s mother is dead; his marriage wound up in shambles, as did his career as a corporation lawyer. His father, who falsely claims to be a combat veteran of World War II, chastises him not only for his failures but for his cowardice: he did a stretch in seminary to avoid the draft during the Vietnam war.

Vin Farr is the antithesis of Billy: rich, handsome, a decorated Air Force veteran, husband of the wealthiest and most beautiful girl around, with whom Billy has been secretly in love for as long as he can remember. But fortunes change, and at the beginning of the story Vin Farr is dead, his body left on a river bank; and with whatever help he can get from the coroner and others, Billy must find out how Vin died and who, if anybody, killed him. This is the thrust of the story, but there are not many suspects in the case, and the mystery of what kind of man Vin Farr was is soon exhausted. There is Billy’s love for Vin’s widow, Rhea, but early in the story Rhea reveals that she returns Billy’s love. Consequently the novel largely survives on its images, the people and places that Billy uncovers in the course of his investigation.

Hoffman is a good writer, but finding something fresh to say about backwoods sheriffs and fundamentalist preachers, black supremacists and the miscegenation of the gentry is a problem. One of the difficulties in writing about the South is that there is not much left about it to discover. Writers often say that they write to find out what they think, but now most novelists who try to write about the South know from the beginning what they think and how they feel about almost any circumstance or situation that they might encounter. Hoffman made up his mind about race relations and the Moral Majority long ago: his views are identical with those of almost all other artists and intellectuals not only in this country but in the world. My point is not that his views are wrong but that they are conventional and even procrustean. His dialogue is good; his detail is sharp; his narrative pace and his style are impressive. But the sense of déja vu is frequently distracting.

This is not to say that this novel is devoid of innovation. From the beginning it is obvious that Vin’s death was not natural, and there is only one real suspect among the personae. But the method by which Vin is killed and the motive for the killing are surprising. And, as I have indicated, the detective story is merely the hook. Billy’s father is a rich character and never better than when he brings himself fearfully to admit that he was not in combat after all but served with the quarter-masters. Eddie Blue, a young black, is well drawn. He steals the Paynes’ tea service, melts it down, and sells the silver, but he keeps the sugar bowl, even when he is in the swamp trying to escape from the police, because nobody in his family has ever had anything like it. Rhea is convincingly drawn, and Hoffman is able to convey to the reader her air of refined sensuality that renders Billy inarticulate when he is in her presence.

Hoffman’s Billy Payne is typical of heroes of recent southern novels, and he is as out of joint with his time and place as Hamlet. He can respect some of the blacks around him, but only after they demand respect of him. To him rednecks are rednecks and not good country people. The rich are selfish and callous, and the clergy are either vapid or fascist. Only a rebel here and there, an isolated soul out of tune with the backwardness of rural Virginia, gets Hoffman’s imprimatur. At the end of Godfires Billy commits homicide, accidentally in a way, in an effort to assert the morality of the code of criminal justice he has sworn to uphold. This is on target, I believe: in a world filled with moral uncertainties, what else have we to guide us except the law? But I wish there were more. I wish Billy’s life had another dimension.