In ‘Everybody Knows,’ former sports writer tackles post-apocalyptic satire
The new novel by Memphis writer David Wesley Williams is called “Everybody Knows” (Jackleg Press). It’s a tricky title, since there’s a dazzling collection of facts that hardly anybody knows embedded in this book about a politician and his parasites, a death-row inmate who claims he’s innocent, a pair of young-ish lovers, and an assortment of musicians and writers.
“Everybody Knows,” described in one blurb as “a laugh-out-loud post-apocalyptic satire,” begins 10 years from now, as most of the characters are afloat on vessels headed for Memphis, escaping a biblical rain that has submerged Nashville and a large swath of Tennessee. They drift, most drink whiskey, some make love and reminisce.
And they debate cultural issues, asking such questions as: Why does the public hate the press?
David Wesley Williams will sign copies of his novel “Everybody Knows” at Burke’s Book Store, 936 S. Cooper, 5:30-6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 19. (Courtesy Barb Williams)
People don’t want the “pure, unvarnished truth,” the Tennessee governor’s chief of staff, a man named Bate, explains. “They want it with mashed potatoes and white pepper gravy, and rolled biscuits good for sopping.”
That cynical state staffer offers his theory to a journalist he’s trying to buy off. They’re on the deck of a steamboat carrying Gov. Trey Flattery, along with his cabinet and his two mistresses, “a bluegrass band with pop leanings,” and a treasury of the state’s artifacts, including the retired electric chair Old Smokey, which Flattery converts into a throne of sorts. Flattery and Bate may be the most interesting couple in the novel: “It was said that one was the most powerful man in the state, and the other was governor.”
Bate casually remarks to the journalist, “So you’re a sports writer, then. Not a real reporter.”
The joke is on the novel’s author. Williams, 61, worked for The Commercial Appeal from 1988 to 2017, most of those years as a sports writer, columnist and editor. During that tenure, he covered Olympics in Norway, Atlanta and Sydney, the Kentucky Derby and the Lewis-Tyson title fight.
The Daily Memphian columnist and radio host Geoff Calkins, a longtime Williams fan, recalled in an email that when he applied for his first job in Memphis, at The Commercial Appeal, “They sent me old sports sections to critique and I remember thinking, ‘This guy they already have, David Williams, is fantastic.’”
“But his real strength — his superpower — was the way he spun words,” Calkins said. “So it’s not exactly surprising to those of us who worked alongside him that he has found his true calling as a novelist. David was that good.”
Williams, who will read from and sign his book at Burke’s Book Store in Cooper-Young on Thursday, Jan. 19, grew up in Maysville, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. His first job out of college was with his hometown newspaper, followed by three years as a sports writer at the York (Pennsylvania) Daily Record, where he met his wife, Barb, who was a copy editor at the time. They moved to Memphis when he took the job at the city’s morning daily.
Williams’ first novel, “Long Gone Daddies” (John F. Blair) from 2013, is about the trials and travels of a Southern rock band. He says he “got hooked on music” as a teenager, long before he moved to the music mecca of Memphis.
“I can remember where I was standing in my house, in my bedroom, when I first heard Elvis Costello on the radio,” he said.
A car radio was the source of another such inspirational spark.
“The first time I heard Hank Williams’ voice, I’d just started driving. I’d never heard his voice, and it seemed so weird, so deep in the holler.”
Still, he didn’t take up an instrument, just a lifelong devotion to music and its history. He said he only began playing his first instrument, the ukulele, in recent months.
In “Everybody Knows,” Williams briefly inserts himself into the narrative as “the author” and takes an autobiographical side trip to the time in 2002 when he wrote a letter seeking advice from the Oxford, Mississippi-based writer Larry Brown. Williams says from time to time, he still takes out the real-life letter he got back. Writers like to commiserate, he writes in the novel:
“They’ll look over your scars and show you theirs, like jailbirds comparing tattoos. And then tell you to keep at it ...”
“Everybody Knows” is a novel with footnotes. As readers follow the action, they’ll learn such wide-ranging facts as the ingredients for a Boulevardier cocktail, how the song “I Didn’t Hear Anybody Pray” became “Wreck on the Highway” and who used “ding-dong” in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
A decade passed between the publishing of his first and second novels, but Williams, who retired from his last job as a writer, coach and adviser at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital fundraising organization ALSAC, said he has three more works of fiction in more or less finished form.
One is a newspaper story set in 2013, “about a reporter who gets laid off from the only job he ever wanted.” Another is set around the old greyhound dog track in West Memphis, about a guy who finds a new family at the race grounds. (Williams and his wife have been adopting retired racing greyhounds since 2008 and currently have two.)
While Williams opens “Everybody Knows” by describing it as “a Southern Gothic, mock-apocalyptic, shrunken-epic satire of politics, race, religion, sex, climate change,” and six or seven other subjects, he describes the third book he’s hoping to publish in the future in more modest terms. It’s about a folk artist whose adventures make for a combination “spiritual journey and a beer run.”
David Wesley Williams will read from and sign his novel “Everybody Knows” at Burke’s Book Store, 936 S. Cooper, from 5:30-6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 19. For more information, please click here.
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