Paris Trout
by Pete Dexter
Summary
Paris Trout owns the store in Cotton Point, Georgia, lends money to Black customers at terms he sets, and regards himself as the most rational man in town. When a car deal goes bad, he drives to the buyer's house with an enforcer to collect, and shoots two people: Rosie Sayers, a fourteen year old girl who had come to the house for safety, and the woman sheltering her. Rosie dies. Trout feels nothing, expects nothing to follow, and the novel's cold engine is that he is almost right.
Dexter distributes the aftermath among three witnesses. Harry Seagraves, the town's best lawyer, takes Trout's defence because that is what the town's best lawyer does, and finds the case seeping into him like groundwater, the dead girl arriving in his sleep. Hanna Trout, married to Paris long enough to know what he is, testifies to her husband's nature in scenes of sexual violence the book does not soften, and her slow extraction of herself, and her alliance with Seagraves, gives the novel its one line of hope. And the town itself, jury, barbershop and country club, performs its verdict: a conviction calibrated to mean nothing, a sentence arranged to evaporate.
Trout, untouched by law, is not untouched: his rationality begins producing bodyguards, lead lined rooms and finally the courthouse morning the whole book has been walking toward.
Just over three hundred pages, written in Dexter's dry, nailed down sentences.
Best for readers who want the Southern justice novel with no Atticus in it: a study of what a town will absorb rather than change.
Historical Context & Significance
Paris Trout won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1988, and its origins are journalism: Pete Dexter, then a newspaper columnist, had lived in Milledgeville, Georgia, and built the novel from the case of Marion Stembridge, a Milledgeville storekeeper and moneylender who shot two Black women in 1949, was convicted and never served, and in 1953 murdered two lawyers before killing himself. Dexter moved the material to the invented Cotton Point and kept its temperature.
Dexter himself was nearly beaten to death in 1981 by a Philadelphia crowd angered by a column, an experience after which he turned seriously to writing fiction; the novels that followed, Deadwood, Train, The Paperboy, share this book's flat, exact menace.
The 1991 film gave Dennis Hopper one of his best late roles as Trout, with Barbara Hershey as Hanna, and the novel has settled in as a modern classic of American noir, the crime novel as social autopsy.