The Book You Have to Read: “Paris Trout,” by Pete Dexter

(Editor’s note: This is the 177th installment in The Rap Sheet’s now 14-year-old series about great but forgotten books. It comes from William Swanson, a Minneapolis journalist who publishes books under the pen name W.A. Winter. His works include three true-crime accounts as well as five suspense novels, the most recent of which are The Secret Lives of Dentists [2021] and My Name Is Joe LaVoie [2022], both published by Seventh Street Books. You can find out more at Winter’s Web site.)

I’m always surprised by how quickly even great contemporary books fade from the reading public’s eye. I shouldn’t be, considering that anywhere from 500,000 to one million books are published in the United States every year. Consider, for instance, the relative obscurity of Paris Trout (1988), Pete Dexter’s gritty, heartbreaking masterpiece. Granted, the novel was published more than 30 years ago. Despite its winning the National Book Award for Fiction, that’s a long stretch, one that’s been filled with thousands of other worthy titles. But this book still demands—and rewards—our attention.

I recently read Paris Trout for the third time, and was as dazzled, moved, and shaken as I was the first time. It’s one of the saddest, most unsettling books I’ve ever read. It’s also one of the best.

Dexter tells the tale of a small Georgia town named Cotton Point, circa mid-1950s. The place is stuck in the stratified depths of the Jim Crow South. The town’s wealth and power belong, of course, to its white elite, while its African-American residents are strictly confined to ramshackle areas such as Damp Bottoms and Indian Heights, far removed from Cotton Point’s money and influence. The ambient air is relentlessly sultry and oppressive. Recently, rabid foxes have put a scare into the community; one of them bites a 14-year-old black girl named Rosie Sayers, who, Dexter informs us, is “bothered by nightmares.” Echoes of William Faulkner and early Cormac McCarthy, yet in its storyline, tone, and characterization, Paris Trout is sui generis, quite unlike anything I’ve read before or since.

At its center is the eponymous Mr. Trout, a gnarled, middle-aged lawyer, businessman, and usurer (“banker” is too kind a word) from an old, influential family. A sister had been a court clerk; his mother, who now wastes away in a nursing home, once ran the family store. Whatever his antecedents, Trout is an avaricious, obsessive, and unregenerate racist. At one point in the novel, a large copperhead appears on a backwoods road. The snake—“thick as a man’s arm,” we’re told—has been run over and is “stuck to the highway in her own gum,” but, like the legally embattled Trout, it is cold-blooded, unpredictable, and still deadly.

(Above) Dexter’s novel was adapted as a 1991 Showtime TV movie starring Dennis Hopper as Trout, Barbara Hershey as his wife, Hanna, and Ed Harris as attorney Harry Seagraves.

Trout sets the narrative in motion when he shoots and kills luckless Rosie Sayers and an older woman who is attempting to protect her, when he and a henchman try to collect a debt from the girl’s brother. (Almost everyone, especially members of the town’s hardscrabble Black community, owes Trout money.) As the story progresses, Trout’s lunatic paranoia swells to monstrous proportions. While awaiting trial for murder, he rapes his wife with a water bottle, threatens various townspeople, and gives in to a madness that strains our understanding of the term. His wife tells his doctor, “He has been fortifying his room. He has covered the floor with glass and set the legs of his bed into overshoes. He sleeps with a sheet of lead under his mattress” to protect himself from an assassin he fears is lurking beneath his bed.

Eventually set against Trout are his conflicted lawyer, Harry Seagraves, another middle-aged scion of Cotton Point’s elite, Trout’s long-suffering wife, a refined former schoolteacher—Hanna’s marriage to Trout is one of the few incongruities in the book—and her callow attorney, Carl Bonner, an idealistic former Eagle Scout whom she hires to handle her divorce.

As he did in his brilliant 1983 debut, God’s Pocket, Dexter populates this tale with a memorable supporting cast—including a thuggish ex-cop who works for Trout, a pint-size judge who recesses court on especially hot days to retreat to his chambers and douse himself with talcum powder, and Seagraves’ wife, a former Miss Georgia, still beautiful but clueless. (When Harry tells her two black people have been shot, her first response is to ask if they “worked for anybody we know.”) He paints in vivid, if fading colors Cotton Point and surrounding Ether County, from the elegant homes of its self-satisfied gentry to the dusty shacks of its Black underclass. Regardless of the address, everybody, it seems, is afraid of the sullen, solitary, serpentine Trout.

Although Paris Trout is immensely suspenseful, there is no mystery about how the story will end. It will end badly—probably worse than you expect. The sense of doom is announced by Dexter’s first several sentences: “In the spring of that year an epidemic of rabies broke out in Ether County, Georgia.” Mainly cattle were sickened, yet two persons were also reported to have been bitten by rabid foxes. The real threat here, however, is not rabies, but instead Paris Trout. The book offers a murder trial held in Cotton Point’s stifling historic courthouse, a drunken civic train ride celebrating the town’s sesquicentennial, and a mock trial on the courthouse lawn, complete with a functioning stocks for men judged guilty of not sprouting facial hair for the celebration. Those are distractions. Meanwhile, the suspense builds like a force of nature.

Throughout this book, Dexter’s prose is precise and often haunting. Shortly after Rosie’s shooting, for instance, Seagraves visits the site:

In the kitchen he stopped, knowing this was the place. It was the smallest room in the house, and the ceiling back here slanted down for reasons he could not discern. He imagined Trout, stooping to fit himself into this place where he did not belong.

The pots and pans were hung from nails over the stove, a line of canning jars sat empty against the far wall. The door from the kitchen outside hung half off its hinges.

Paris Trout had come into this room, where there wasn’t anything, and taken a child’s life.

Unlike God’s Pocket, there are few laughs to be found in Paris Trout, unless you think the grotesqueries of a jerkwater Southern town amusing. Dexter, who spent part of his growing-up in Georgia, does not. This is not Mayberry R.F.D. There are no clowns or caricatures. Each character, from the town’s civic and legal establishment to the Black denizens of Damp Bottoms, is an individual, sharply and respectfully drawn. You believe them all, and fear their fate.