‘Meely La Bauve’ Lacks Depth, Power

“Meely la Bauve” by Ken Wells (Random House, 240 pages, $19.95)

The title character of Ken Wells’s earnest and slender first novel, “Meely la Bauve,” is a feisty, 15-year-old Cajun boy coming of age in the early 1960’s in the Louisiana bayou.

Meely is a truant who spends his days swimmin’, huntin’, fishin’ and engagin’ in other activities that - because they occur in the South - apparently can be accomplished only by dropping the “g” from the ends of verbs.

The boy has time for such doin’s because his momma is dead and his daddy is a drunk alligator hunter who disappears for days at a time.

It’s clear that Wells adores this place, and he has an easy way with its language and people. Early on, the novel skims along with Twain-like doses of innocent adventure: Meely’s friend Chickie explodes a bloated cow and Meely’s dad wrestles a 10-foot alligator that later flies through the air at a car.

But when Wells goes fishin’ for deeper themes, they don’t always bite.

Meely has his first sexual fumblings with a young black girl. He is chased by town bullies because he might be “part-Wild Injun.” And of course, there are the requisite Southern redneck cops who apparently live to harass Meely and his father.

Little of this carries with any depth or power. The bad guys are cartoon bad, the good guys unfailingly honest and capable. The action is episodic, the outcome never in doubt. By the time the novel moves to a standard Southern courtroom, the payoff is quick and predictable. What started as simple storytelling reveals itself as just a simple story.

It didn’t have to be that way. Southern fiction, especially, has a long tradition of using simple, even naive, narration to get at the deepest truths.

Wells, a writer and editor for The Wall Street Journal, keeps it short and precise. In fact, he should have trusted his writing and dropped the glossary tacked onto the end of his book to explain Cajun terms.

Too bad there wasn’t as easy a fix for the novel’s simplistic treatment of race and sex and Southern justice. Then again, maybe moral complexity is too much to ask for in a world of exploding cows and flying alligators.