The Innocent

by Madison Jones

First novel by a modern master of Southern fiction, this tale is reminiscent of Hardy's Return of the Native―set in rural twentieth-century Tennessee. Southern Classics Series.

383 pages, Paperback

First published January 25, 1993

About the author

Madison Percy Jones was a novelist from Nashville, Tennessee. He published almost a dozen novels in his lifetime, and is considered "one of the major figures of contemporary southern letters."

Reviews

[Daniel Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Madison Jones was one of twenty-one charter members of the Fellowship of Southern Writers which included Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote and Cleanth Brooks. His novels were panned by critics. Flannery O’Connor could not understand why they did not sell. He is perhaps the most under-recognized, under-appreciated Southern writer.
My first exposure to his work is his 1987 debut novel, The Innocent. Its prologue is as fine a piece of fiction as I have ever read. From there to the end, the writing is precise; pregnant with description and meaning.
The story is about estrangement. The protagonist Duncan Welch, after several years away, returns home to the family tobacco farm in Tennessee. He finds his small hometown rapidly growing, modernizing into the kind of money-grubbing amoral place which had repelled him back to his roots. There is guilt for having left home, family friction, neighbor dislike, romantic attachment, and a rare stallion. He finds common cause with Aaron, a moonshiner squatting on a hidden cove of the family farm.
It is a gut-wrenching read. It is impossible not to get wrapped up with Duncan and Aaron. They remind of Flannery’s O’Connor’s characters, seeking or not seeking, finding or not finding, their salvation.
In the preface, Thomas Landess says the book is to be read slowly, savoring each sentence like a sip of wine. I did that, and was rewarded. Five stars.

[Drew Norwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine novel/modern tragedy with many similarities to both RPW’s Night Rider and Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper. Duncan Welsh's fall is believable and inevitable, as a man who takes his own honor and pleasure and the end of life, and makes an idol of the old ways (though this certainly oversimplifies it): "In that he had thought like a boy to whom consequences are only shadows...He was annoyed simply because this new turn of events must curtail and modify the pleasures that the last two months had brought him...He might have been for the first time perceiving and rebelling against the seriousness latent in all the extremes of human pleasure." (194)

And, most fitting, his end is just: "He knew only that he had drifted into a world where there was a terrifying absence of all things that the mind and the senses can know. Except that there was light, and he could see. He might, in fact, have been nothing else than an eye without a body, without even a lid to close against the insufferable brightness of the sun. More and more he became conscious of the light. It became a kind of agony he had never experienced before. He longed to shut it out, to close or avert his eye. But there was no way. Until of itself his vision clouded as with an uprush of tears. The light became almost bearable. As his eye clouded more he could look at it without pain. At last, when he saw that the light would vanish completely, he had reached the point of regretting that he had to be left in the oncoming dark." (370)

[Richmond Vernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been on a little Southern Gothic kick, having reading Penn Warren's "Wilderness," O'Connors "The Violent Bear It Away," and most recently, Jone's little book, "Nashville 1864." For my money, "The Innocent" outshines each of those entries.