The Watermelon King, by Daniel Wallace

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003

$23.00 (cloth); 226 pp.

Daniel Wallace, raised in Birmingham, has recently become a kind of household name in Alabama, since the filming of his first novel, Big Fish (1998) outside of Montgomery. Directed by Tim Burton and starring Albert Finney, the film promises to make Wallace famous, and why not? He is a hardworking, likable, good-natured, clever fellow who has been earning a living for years in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as a cartoonist, illustrator, and designer of humorous tee-shirts.

Wallace has a second novel, Ray in Reverse (2000), and now he has a third one, The Watermelon King, which is not exactly a sequel to Big Fish, but which also takes place in Wallace’s fictional Alabama town of Ashland, located some sixty miles northwest of Birmingham--something like Cullman, perhaps, with whispers of Winston County.

Wallace is a self-declared mythologist. The subtitle of Big Fish, in which the hero Edward Bloom leaves his hometown, fights with a giant, rescues a beautiful maiden, probably a goddess, from a water moccasin and, in general, has extraordinary powers, is: "A Novel of Mythic Proportions." The ideal reader for The Watermelon King would have just finished reading The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazier, The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, and Bullfinch’s Mythology. But if you haven’t, don’t worry.

The town of Ashland is the Watermelon Capitol of the World. Watermelons for ages have grown there larger and sweeter than anywhere else, due to two traditional practices in Ashland. One is a kind of intensive fertilization. All dead things are buried in the fields, mice and roadkill armadillos and raccoons and cats and dogs and, secretly at night, the cadavers of people. All the coffins in the Ashland cemeteries are empty. The deceased citizens are pushing up watermelons. This is a town secret.

The other traditional practice is the pageant of the Watermelon King. I quote: "A male virgin was thought to bring a curse upon the town . . . was seen as a threat to the prosperity of the town, and thus each year one man was chosen to be cured. It was a sacrifice, like all sacrifices. It was the sacrifice of his virginity." The chosen male, virgin and over eighteen, was taken out into the watermelon fields and there made love to by a local girl, not necessarily a virgin. Lovemaking in the furrows is an ancient and honorable practice in agricultural societies and is actually part of the ancient May pole ceremonies, of which we still have vestigial elements.

BUT Lucy Rider moves to Ashland, thinks the ceremony barbaric and cruel, and manages to put a stop to it. She claims to have slept with that year’s only adult male virgin, an idiot named Iggy. There is no ceremony that summer, no sacrifice, the crops dry up, and Lucy Rider gives birth to Thomas Rider who, eighteen years later and still a virgin, returns to Ashland looking for his father, who is in fact not Iggy, the town idiot, who has now also become the classic village scapegoat. Lucy was very beautiful, and a dozen men confess to the paternity, all bragging and all lying. The revelation of the identity of Thomas’ actual father is a shock and I think a serious flaw in the novel. Unprepared for, mainly unexplained, Wallace is here too trendy and, as the British say, Too Clever By Half.

Still, this is an intelligent, lively narrative. As usual, Wallace’s characters are quirky and eccentric. This novel, unlike life as described by Thomas Hobbes, is whimsical, delightful, and short.