The Watermelon King

As a Southerner and lover of Southern literature, I especially enjoy books that celebrate the art of storytelling. Anyone who has read Big Fish can tell you that Daniel Wallace is a master storyteller, and The Watermelon King proves it. I can't wait for the next one!

I enjoyed THE WATERMELON KING a lot. I enjoyed the way it kept happening on its own peculiar terms. My expectation as a reader is to encounter characters who are drawn according to a predictable and, at least for the purposes of fiction, a malleable psychology--in other words, characters who are in the business of not being themselves, or of not knowing what a self is. Of course Shakespeare didn't write this way, or Faulkner. Wallace's characters, too, are grandly or mythically motivated--not parsed out the way modern people like to think of themselves. These characters are what they are and they do the thing they are. They don't play at growth. It's quite nice to be taken into this pre-therapeutic and unsophisticated universe -- a fabulous universe if you will -- and be told a story about love, fertility, and the way we thrive on the story itself--the telling of the story, the passing on of the story, and ultimately, the tragedy of the story. WATERMELON KING is a work that sticks around.

With Watermelon King, Wallace builds on Big Fish and Ray in Reverse by writing what is the most cohesive novel of the trio. Publisher's Weekly called it a "slight mistep," I call that a "slight misread." Come on. He's at his best here, combining the best of that staitforward storytelling seen in O'Conner, the strong regional construction of Faulkner, and the magical realism of Marquez. Unlike, say... Rushdie, Wallace avoids using magical realism in an apish, overwhelming way, but rather puts it in service of the story. He takes it over the top just enough. This book pushes the limits of genre, avoiding the perimeters of most of the bland treacle that we submit our eyes to. You oughta read it. Great book.

I read Wallace's first novel BIG FISH and liked it a lot -- it's really funny and totally knocks you out emotionally in the end -- so I moved onto this one, which is set in the same town and deals with similar themes.I say similar and not the same because Wallace has clearly grown as a writer; he has a magical way of telling a story that has you guessing what really happened all the way through. THE WATERMELON KING was even more strange than BIG FISH, and I loved it. I haven't read such an original writer in a long time. it's as if a southerner was channeling Garcia Marquez or something -- indescribable, but fantastic in every sense of the word.

I've read Daniel Wallace's last two books, and I think The Watermelon King is his best, even better than Big Fish, which I heard was being made into a movie by Tim Burton. The Watermelon King takes stock Southern characters-- the village idiot, the old man with stories-- and turns them on their heads by making them the heroes. Daniel Wallace's writing is always funny and sad at the same time, and in this book, it's also pretty absorbing and much more risky. I highly recommend this book to people who like something a little different, funny, and moving.