The Total View of Taftly. - Review - book review

The Total View of Taftly, by Scott Morris (Hill Street, 207 pp., $18.95)

Taftly Harper, after a lifetime of heftiness, has jogged himself skinny. This, he thinks, will enable him to live up to the example of his illustrious granddaddy-for whom his hometown, the southern hamlet of Copiah Springs, is named-and, more important, to find love in the arms of an equally fit woman. This, Taftly feels certain, is the Total View-his destiny, as seen from God's vantage point. But sadly, it is not to be. After looking for love at a local watering hole, he finds himself trampled beneath the unwanted advances of the gro tesquely obese Clydesdale twins, Trixie and Trina, an experience so horrifying it leaves him wondering if there is a Total View waiting for him at all.

So begins Scott Morris's debut novel, a deft combination of John Kennedy Toole and Carl Hiaasen, by turns hilarious and brooding. The lovably neurotic Taftly moves out to the lake on the edge of town to ponder his fate, and is befriended (Taftly would say "tormented") by Dennis Jolly, a shirtless, body-building, shack-dwelling, ne'er-do-well handyman who insists that his receding hairline is the result of a government experiment and that aliens are trying to abduct him. As Morris puts it: "Evolution could never ac count for Dennis Jolly. He seemed to have been a mistake of proportions that could only find explanation in the existence of a malevolent deity." Convinced that Taftly is a "tortured genius," Dennis secretly records his ramblings, planning to sell the tapes for $9.95 a pop. Meanwhile, Taftly receives a death threat from a soon-to-be-released con.

Everything here seems a little strange, but it's all perfectly normal in Copiah Springs. Morris knows what all southerners know: that otherwise bizarre behavior makes sense in hot, sticky locales; that once the humidity reaches a certain level, the limits to human peculiarity fall away.

With The Total View of Taftly, Morris has managed a rare feat-a novel that is at once bawdy and tender, probing, and wise. The message here has to do with the importance of faith, of believing in the Total View even when it isn't apparent. Despite the kookiness that surrounds him, Taftly is marvelously true-to-life, as when he goes on a date with a pretty college student and is swept away: "Everything she told him was exactly right in the way that nitrous oxide is exactly right." By the time Taftly's destiny has finally come into focus, the reader is convinced that Scott Morris's novel is a little like that coed. Call it nitrous oxide with a side of grits.

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