In the middle Searching for Andy Griffith: My Father's JourneyAs I read Evan Dalton Smith's dig into his deep, complicated feelings about the late actor and North Carolina icon, I was oddly reminded of another book. PragueArthur Phillips' 2002 novel about twenty-something expats living in Budapest in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Phillips' nostalgia-plagued characters feel that real life is out of reach, “trapped in the amber of a period piece,” as Phillips wrote about the book, or dwarfed by “the glories of the future and the fairy-tale glow of the past.” As they read the novel, they are plagued by the suspicion that while they are trapped in Budapest, real life is happening in Prague, hence the joke in the title.
Prague What came to mind was Looking for Andy Griffith This film is not, at heart, about Andy Griffith. Looking For Andy Griffith, it's more an indirect meditation on what he represented and what he may or may not have embodied, to Smith and others, but especially to Smith. Pragueit's mostly about misplacing things.
Complications aside, Smith recognizes Griffith as a star, so let's talk about him: Andy Griffith (1926-2012) first smiled in the fall of 1960 as Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry. The Andy Griffith Show The half-hour comedy premiered on CBS, where it remained in the top ten for eight seasons and has been shown in syndicated reruns ever since. Griffith later played other roles. MatlockBut it was Andy Taylor's performance – wise, patient, compassionate and almost abnormally polite – that endeared him to Americans.
And then there's Evan Dalton Smith. A distant cousin of Griffith's, Smith grew up in Asheboro, North Carolina, a town that on the surface bears little resemblance to the fictional Mayberry but on the inside offers a stark contrast: the father next door beat his sons mercilessly, the local coroner's son hanged himself, and a state trooper's son patrolled the neighborhood, targeting boys. “Cable television was introduced to our part of North Carolina in the 1980s, a few years after my father was murdered,” Smith writes. “My sister…matched our family's blood types and determined that my recently deceased father could not have been involved in my DNA. Things got even worse in the house.” His mother's drug addiction and mental health were among the problems. But Smith had a way of dealing with it. He turned off the TV. Andy Griffith The replay transported him instantly to a simpler, calmer, more paternal place, where any problem, no matter how serious, could be solved in 30 minutes. For those “30 minutes,” he writes, “I existed more courageously, more lightly, out of time.”
He wasn't alone. The film was produced during a time of constant assassinations, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. The Andy Griffith Show As Smith points out, the show offered a respite from “all the anxieties and sorrows of our modern times.” (Not surprisingly, ratings have risen again during the pandemic.) When Smith began researching Andy more than a decade ago, it was this aspect of the show, and Griffiths' character, that he was looking to explore. But then another sorrow hit him: the sudden breakdown of his marriage and family.
Smith's divorce burden Looking for Andy Griffith(Griffiths himself is divorced, but that's strangely enough left unmentioned.) Smith may test your tolerance for self-pity at times; the waves of sad divorced-father energy can overwhelm the story at times. And the story itself may be divisive. Carson McCullers's Autobiography In (2020), Smith pits his life against Griffith's to see where sparks fly, and their intertwined lives are told in vignettes that touch upon Griffith's career, fanbase, cultural legacy, North Carolina history, Smith's turbulent life after divorce, and, perhaps above all, “our desires and nostalgia for things that never were.”
There's Mayberry, perfect fathers, the misty streets of Prague in Arthur Phillips novels. There's a lot of sadness in the book, but as Smith reminds us, Mayberry has its own river. “Opie's mother, inexplicably, dies before the show begins, which drives the fiction,” he writes. Aunt Bea jumps in and “prevents the family from falling apart.” The story was born out of tragedy. What Griffith gives us, post-'60s TV viewers and Evan Dalton Smith, both fatherless child and semi-broken adult, is an antidote. “Humor,” Smith writes, “to combat the perpetual sadness.”
There's Mayberry, perfect fathers, the misty streets of Prague in Arthur Phillips novels. There's a lot of sadness in the book, but as Smith reminds us, Mayberry has its own river. “Opie's mother, inexplicably, dies before the show begins, which drives the fiction,” he writes. Aunt Bea jumps in and “prevents the family from falling apart.” The story was born out of tragedy. What Griffith gives us, post-'60s TV viewers and Evan Dalton Smith, both fatherless child and semi-broken adult, is an antidote. “Humor,” Smith writes, “to combat the perpetual sadness.”
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If the beach lead is working well, the details should stick together like wet sand. Great River (W.W. Norton & Company) In a new chronicle of the South's iconic waterway, like the Mississippi Silt, New Orleans journalist Boyce Upholt lets slip fascinating legends along with shocking conservation truths. Oxford, Mississippi poet Amy Nezhukumatashil writes, One bite at a time (Ecco) is a buffet of odes to foods both personal and universal, like the joys of July: a cold slice of watermelon and a rind tossed in the bed of a pickup truck. But no summer vacation is complete without an engrossing, epic story. Hick (St. Martin's Press), novelist Taylor Brown draws inspiration from the West Virginia Mine Wars of 1920 and 1921 to craft a tale scorched with coal, snipers, and moonshine. —CJ Lotz Diego
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