A certain ‘smart speaker’ makes quick book purchases a tad too easy, doesn’t she? Open email, flip through the Times book review, ask her to buy it now, and Bam! an exciting new read (or a pile of ‘em) shows up on your doorstep in a day or two. To make matters worse, I happen to be a hardcover snob and relent to a paperback purchase only when that’s all there is, and hardcover editions can be pricey. About a year ago, though, I realized my knee-jerk book-buying habit was starting to add up and finally thought maybe I ought to go on get a library card. Also, there is the small matter of limited shelf space remaining in this house; we have squirreled books everywhere, not always logically. Getting a library card, though, is one ritual among a few important several I think, that says, I officially belong here, and it was high time.

Thing is, what I want to read is rarely available at our local library branch, when I want to read it. And there is a one-week limit imposed on borrowing books in the ‘new releases’ section. One. Week. Pfft. By the time I hunker down to read at any day’s end, I’m fairly well wiped out; sometimes I get lucky with a couple of unfettered hours on weekends. Sometimes. But suffice it to say, it takes me a little bit to get through a pile of library books.

There is a singular joy, though, in thumbing through dog-eared volumes at the local public library, and taking in that unmistakable perfume that smacks you in the nose when you walk through the door, that distinctive combination of ink, glue, cloth, and cellophane. The smart speaker can tell me I’m the Most Intelligent Editor on command, but she can’t give me that.

My public library book-finding ‘method’ isn’t much of a method, and goes like so. After navigating the length of stacks where I hope the book or at least the author I want exists—and hoping it has been reshelved where it belongs—and then nearly always striking out, I scan other titles randomly. Finally, I pull one that looks like something, blindly open it, and start reading. It is a haphazard method at best I admit (and smacks of judging a book by its cover), but has led me to some fantastic books and writers.

This method in fact led me to novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux a couple of months ago. (In case you’re interested in such trivia, though it is spelled differently than Henry David’s surname, it is pronounced the same, says Paul, although a particular eleventh-grade English teacher in Memphis insisted Henry David preferred THOR-eau, sounds like thorough, but that is another story and I am not sure it is even correct.) The title on the spine verily shouted unto me that his was indeed the one to take home: Deep South. How could I not?

But yesterday I had to return it for good because I’d finally exhausted all auto-renewal allowances, so I caved and bought my own copy, in hardcover—used, in good condition. Now I can read it as slowly and deliberately, and as many times, as I wish. It is not that this book is a stodgy read (quite the opposite is true), but because the content fascinates me so thoroughly, I can’t seem to get through more than five or ten pages without feeling the urgency to step away and research a person, place, or establishment in this fascinating account, as told by a writer from New England of all places. And this alone compels me to read and reread passages, the knowing he’s ‘not from around here.’

Nor am I from the rural Deep South Theroux paints in these pages, but instead grew up in sprawling Memphis, Tennessee in a ‘white flight’ suburb east of the city. Shortly after we moved to Memphis from Knoxville, when I was still only five, my ballerina mama took a Saturdays-only teaching job at a small ballet school down in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a little over an hour’s drive one way. While my memories of those days have long dimmed, I do recall cotton fields stretching for miles on both sides of the highway, and my dad occasionally pointing out the crop-dusters flying low, low, low over the fields to drop pesticide on them; dad worked as a cotton linter buyer for a P&G subsidiary just out of college, so this was already becoming a landscape familiar to him. But I had no idea yet of the legacy of cotton grown in the Deep American South.

I was also woefully unaware of the racial tensions in the rural South (unaware of racial tensions at all, really, until middle school) and of the crippling poverty Paul Theroux tells his reader, more than once, is worse than much he has seen firsthand in developing regions in Africa and Asia. Not in some far-off dusty village, but right here on American soil. And not just historically, but stubbornly persisting now. To me, going to Clarksdale was simply visiting the countryside.

In some of these same landscapes today, Paul Theroux describes decaying vernacular architecture and shuttered industries (owing mainly to jobs outsourced overseas), with the modern-day addition of familiar big box retailers and corporate dining establishments that dot the horizon at so many interstate exits, and thus deny the communities there any kind of distinguishing identity to passersby. Farther down the rural highways, though, away from the corporate clatter, the common denominator seems to be race-driven disparities in opportunities just about everywhere he visits. It is not all doom and gloom and hopelessness, to be sure.

But none of this is really news, is it. The stitching together of community woes through the voices of people who live there is what makes this book such a pleasure to read, and what makes it so enlightening, in the best way. I did not know, for example, that Julius Rosenwald—a Jewish businessman and philanthropist, and a founding partner in Sears, Roebuck and Company—funded the building of two-classroom schools in poor Black communities in the rural South to replace ancient and derelict one-room structures where as many as 125 students at times were crammed inside; some 5,000 Rosenwald Schools had been erected in 15 states by the time his estate money ran out, long after his death in 1932. (And now I am hell-bent on finding and photographing one of them.)

I only hope, since a New England writer is the Deep South’s storyteller in this narrative, albeit through many authentic voices, he does not leave too many of us with the impression they are the only stories of the South. But his short, connected essays are a delight and betray a heavy wit and wisdom, often in sections of the book that wander into other realms that still support the central themes in his back-road travels, the best kind.

I leave you with a paragraph from one of these where Theroux opines on William Faulkner in a way I can best describe as a riotous comingling of deep admiration and outright derision.

Often, amid the cadenzas and the phantasmagoria that he makes of the South, there is a passage of pure brilliance, such as this: “the first seconds of fall always seem like a soar: a weightless deliberation preliminary to a rush not downward but upward, the falling body reversed during that second by transubstantiation into the upward rush of earth.” The trouble is that these lovely lines are buried in one rolling six-thousand-word sentence in the “Jail” section of Requiem for a Nun that continues breathlessly for almost forty pages. It’s “like farting ‘Annie Laurie’ through a keyhole,” as Gulley Jimson remarks in The Horse’s Mouth. “It may be clever but is it worth the trouble?”

—Paul Theroux in Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads