Madison Smartt Bell Critical Essay | Critical Review by Diane Roberts

SOURCE: "Stature of Bell Is Uplifted in Gothic 'All Souls' Rising,'" in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 26, 1995, p. K11.

In the following review, Roberts compares All Soul's Rising to William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, noting that Bell's novel "suffers only a little in comparison."

Madison Smartt Bell is a Southerner, a Tennessean, but he's not what you'd call a Southern writer. Since 1987, he has produced nine books, novels and short story collections, occasionally set in the South, occasionally peopled with deracinated Southerners in the big cities of the North, often more about the weird pathologies of late 20th-century American life than meditations on the ever-present painful past of the nation's most romanticized and vilified region.

But his cornucopian All Souls' Rising, nominated for the National Book Award, is a Southern novel—of a sort. It is about slavery, about revolution, about class, about the past, about racial hatred, about the...
(read more)