Mistress Mississippi

In the concluding volume of Louis Daniel Brodsky’s narrative trilogy about a Northerner’s personal odyssey in Faulkner’s Mississippi, the hypocrisy and bigotry of small-town Oxford, with its commercialization of Faulkner, exacerbate the main character’s disillusion, a malaise that ultimately leads to his moral and spiritual degradation. Louis D. Brodsky always works in improbable and daring ways. The narrator of this striking monologue . . . metaphorically transforms the State of Mississippi into "Mistress Mississippi," the image incarnate of his illusions and delusions of desire.