The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish

January 29, 2007
On the eve of Hurricane Katrina, the now elderly narrator, Louis Proby, remembers the great floods of his small Louisiana town in 1927, recounting an intimate, resonant history of the era of Huey Long and Marcus Garvey. Louis, 17, is the son of Cypress Parish's superintendent, William Proby, who ascended the local logging ranks and regularly has to compromise himself in deals with the hardscrabble laborers and casinos in order to keep order in the town, as Louis painfully witnesses. Louis is a dutiful son, smitten with a pretty girl from a French family, Nanette Lançon, and intent on becoming a doctor, as per his father's plans. Offered the job of driving lumber company official Charles Segrist to and from New Orleans, Louis is granted entrée into the grand seedy clubs of the Crescent City and learns a little not just about prostitutes, alcohol and back deals with Isleños bootleggers Olivier Menard and Orlando Funes, but also of plans to blow up a Cypress Parish levee and thus flood the area in order to save New Orleans. Blackwell (Hunger
) elegantly chronicles Louis's conflict between protecting his first love and his obligations to his father, though Louis finds he betrays both.

In the midst of a flood threat, an elderly Louisiana man looks back at a key time in his life, when tragedy disrupted his first romance and politics were a threat to the levee that protected his small community. Scott Sowers doesn't quite sound like the character he portrays in this first-person narrative--he's neither the young man learning harsh lessons about life nor the elderly man looking back reflectively. However, Sowers manages to infuse enough of the older man's wisdom and the younger man's conflicting emotions into the narrative to make it real and heartfelt. This is an engaging coming-of-age story, which also offers glimpses of Louisiana culture. J.A.S. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine