SOURCE: “The Fugitive Hero in New Southern Fiction,” in Sewanee Review, Vol. XCI, No. 3, Summer, 1983, pp. 439-45.

In the following excerpt, Davenport offers a positive assessment of The Land That Drank the Rain.

Being an American, over a century after Henry James’s celebrated remark, is still a complex fate. What is perhaps more noteworthy in our age of easy mobility, mass communication, and increasing national uniformity is that it is still a complex fate—and a virtually unique fate—to be a southerner. More accurately it is a paradoxical fate. The southerner exists at the intersection of two deeply rooted conflicting traditions: on the one hand stand family piety, southern Protestantism, regional loyalty, and attachment to the land; and on the other stands ornery rebelliousness. Take a modern southerner, no matter how sophisticated, and set him down in New York: he is likely to feel like a...