The Snake of God

Written by the New York City-born editor of Vanderbilt University Press, this loosely connected series of reminiscences is, at heart, a poignant medley of faux-Waldensque anecdotes. Striving, apparently, to recapture the magic of his formative years, Young writes of boyhood summers spent hunting snakes at his family's millpond retreat in rural Alabama and of wandering through a setting of woods, streams and factory yards. Opening with a little yarn about a black preacher's encounter with a snake in a backwoods church, Young goes on to consider the divine relationships between snakes and a Judeo-Christian God. While Young's love of language is evident (at times, eloquent), the desperation behind his desire to infuse his childhood memories with magic is too obvious. He simply tries too hard to find epiphanies and profound insight under every rock and in every minor encounter. The book is lyrical to a fault, imbued with a nostalgia that serves no dramatic purpose other than to announce itself. The insight readers are likely to take from this exercise is that sometimes an insistence on bucolic simplicity can be a form of pretension. (Jan.)