Key’s Southern ‘secrets’ too funny, painful, true to share in ‘World’s Largest Man’

A REVIEW OF

The World’s Largest Man: A Memoir

Harrison Scott Key

HarperCollins

$25.99 352 pages

By Jim Ewing

Special to The Clarion-Ledger

Before saying anything about The World’s Largest Man by Mississippian Harrison Scott Key, let’s get down to brass tacks. First, we probably need to keep this book a secret just between us Southerners.

Key, the scurvy lout, reveals all of our secrets. Such as: Most Southerners, despite literary assumptions elsewhere, don’t know how to tell a story. Their dinner conversation is not a Faulkneresque regaling of the gothic intrigues of their kin, but in fact is mostly grunts, or code. Such as:

“You ever speak to old Lamar Bibbs?”

“Not since him and Gola Mae went down yonder after the thing up at the place.”

Silence.

The story ends then, as grandpa studies his dentures that he has placed in his hand to remove particles of corn.

Storytelling itself evolved, reveals Key, because in Mississippi when he was young “there was very little to do but shoot things or get them pregnant.”

So, as you can see, with such truths as this leaking out of Key’s pen, we don’t need to be spreading it around.

Key does reveal that he’s still a Mississippian, sort of, though maybe a bit around the bend living in Savannah, Ga.

“I do believe in the power of Jesus and rifles,” the Belhaven University graduate confides. “But to keep things interesting, I also believe in the power of NPR and the scientific method” — which means he’s probably out of sync with most of the people who write letters to the editor of The Clarion-Ledger — and vote.

Key came about his odd mix of weltanschauung by spending his early years in Memphis, then moving to his parents’ native Mississippi in fourth grade — where, he tells, his classmates had sideburns, body odor, and large male parts.

He had moved, you see, to Puckett in Rankin County.

He chronicles such things as:

– Rites of Passage, such as the dove hunt, where the drunken leader of the gun-toting mayhem says: “Only rules is don’t be shooting nobody in the face.”

– Vital Knowledge, such as the Rankin County News, he relates: “a publication I would later value chiefly for its photographs of local virgins.”

– Football: “It had everything required to make a boy into a man: brutality, blood, a concession stand.”

Living as he did walking between the worlds of Mississippiana and what some people mistakenly call civilization, he learned to observe the ways of people in the Magnolia State the way anthropologists study ancient civilizations.

Largest Man is a laugh riot that will shake the skeletons of any Mississippians with the slightest sliver of a funny bone. But that’s only half the story. It’s leavened by insights about his father, moments of fear and sadness, inadequacy, and anger. For, at heart, Largest Man is a coming of age story about the difficult life his tough-as-nails asphalt salesman father laid out for Key, with its attendant disappointments. Throughout, his mother, a schoolteacher at McLaurin Attendence Center in Star, shines like a gentle beacon of hope and love, albeit with her own quirks.

As a memoir, Largest Man weaves poignant growing up tales that are profound. He reveals very real and somber truths about growing into adulthood, fearing — and knowing — that he never measured up to his father’s expectations, and lays bare his own failings, as a husband, as a father.

Some parts of the book are so filled with sorrow only laughter can heal the pain. We laugh with him, knowing we share his pain, as individuals, as a region.

That agony, too, is our secret we sometimes try too hard to conceal.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at The Clarion-Ledger, is the author of seven books including Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them, in stores now.

16 June 2015
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