Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

AUTHOR: John Berendt
PUBLISHED: 1999
GENRE: Non-Fiction

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is the story of Jim Williams -
Wait.  I'm sorry.  I can't do it.  I can't lie to you, dear reader.  (Takes a deep breath.) I didn't actually read this book. 

No, I didn't watch the movie.  (I'm not that bad.)  I listened to it on CD.  I don't really feel that bad about this, because, as my daily commute is a total of 10 minutes, it took FOREVER to listen to it.  I started to miss NPR.  So I feel I've done my penance, thank you very much.

Midnight takes place in Savannah, Georgia, that beautiful representation of the Old South.  Old-fashioned and secluded, Savannah does things its own way.*  That doesn't mean it's boring, as Berendt learns.  His main focus is Jim Williams, a social-climbing antique dealer who ends up being tried 3 times for the murder of Danny Hansford, local hustler and part-time employee.  Then there are the subplots, which include but are not limited to: Chablis, the cross-dressing cabaret star who makes Berendt her own personal chauffeur; Joe Odam, the piano-playing lawyer who apparently has an extreme aversion to paying rent (or bills of any kind); Luther Driggers, who may or may not poison Savannah's water supply; and a myriad of other characters that don't just make brief cameos but stick around for entire chapters at a time.  There's so much going on in this book that it feels like 3 or 4 books instead of 1, leaving the reader to wonder how the author is ever going to tie it all together.
As it turns out, he couldn't.  Or didn't want to.   It really doesn't matter.  Each story is interesting, but stuck all together, the whole thing starts to wear on you.  Most of them don't ever get a decent ending.  Berendt leaves Chablis at the Black Cotillion Ball and we never hear from her again, despite the fact that at least 3 or 4 chapters have been devoted to her; the reader just ends up wondering why he brought her up to begin with.  Still, it's an intriguing look into a lovely city, one that has intentionally hidden itself away from the rest of the world.  If nothing else, it'll make you want to take a trip down below the Mason-Dixon line.

LENGTH: 416 pages (or 14 very long CDs)
MAINSTREAM OR NOT: It got made into a movie with John Cusack and Kevin Spacey.
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: I'm still undecided.  If you do, however, actually read it.  The CDs are just too much.

*The only thing I knew about Savannah is that it had banished Rhett Butler after he took a girl out for an unsupervised carraige ride, and then refused to marry her.