Midnight in the garden of forgotten bestsellers

"But Isaac," you might feebly protest, "who gives a shit today about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"? And I get it – it's a book destined to be a forgotten bestseller, if it isn't halfway forgotten already. Four years on the Times list (1994-1998), and a full-on movie (1997), and yet during this century, I've mostly only seen it discussed in trans circles (and very little there – it's not a Crying Game or a Silence of the Lambs). John Berendt's "nonfiction novel," half true crime and half kooky portrait of Southern life, with a gay murderer at its center and a Black trans showgirl on its periphery, just isn't anywhere these days. I got curious about it while recovering from surgery, when I had nothing better to do, and finally read this book whose Gothic cover graced end tables throughout my teenage years.

It was an interesting read – wildly mid, but mid in a way most things never achieve. It's rare to read a book and think, "that was somewhat homophobic, transphobic, racist, poorly written, and uninsightful, but only somewhat – the author is trying, in a way that's perfectly indicative of the times in which he wrote." Berendt was already a media veteran when Midnight came out, famously the product of seven years of embedded journalism in Savannah. He was of a class and era when you could graduate from Harvard and immediately begin a job as an associate editor at Esquire. The New Journalism, with its half-essay tone and shameless "I," arose contemporaneously with him, and Midnight is New Journalism, sort of; at least, the "I" is shameless enough. If Berendt doesn't have the style of a Tom Wolfe, he at least has the skill at branding himself.

"Nonfiction novel" is an incredible category, the kind they don't really let you get away with these days. Writing a nonfiction novel means that you get to "remember" whole conversations, rearrange timelines, resurrect dead people and call them "composite characters," and turn interviewees' recollections into third-person scenes. Most insidiously of all, you get to hide and reappear at will. You get to erase that journalistic building block, the Question. We know that Berendt asks the Lady Chablis her birth name, because he shows us the moment, but when she tells him about all the details of her body that a prying cis journalist could possibly want to know about, we often have to guess whether she volunteered the information or if he's omitting his half of the dialogue – and we never see the foundational questions, how he gets her talking in such detail, how he wins her trust.

Admittedly, it doesn't seem impossible that she just told him. Berendt captures her as a trans person of a certain generation, both franker and more ambiguous in her explanation of her gender than is typical today. But he is an untrustworthy narrator where she is concerned, even if he is an honest one – he calls her "a disturbing presence, one that challenged all the natural responses." A very load-bearing "the," here, but to give Berendt his doubtful due, Chablis is also the only character strong enough to really leap off the page. He renders her in dialect, but he can't suppress her vitality. She stands out all the more because Berendt is not, let's say, a rich writer of character. Among his large cast, it's difficult to tell who's supposed to be a charming asshole, who's supposed to be an irrepressible scamp, who's supposed to be sexy vs. pathetic, who's supposed to be the local narrator. With one exception, every character is vaguely appealing and vaguely unnerving, seen from a little remove and described with a sad smile. (The exception is the murder victim.)

"Isaac," you might protest again, "stop it, the book is already dead. If you think it's bad and it has no lingering cultural power, why write about it?" The answer, I think, is the 1990s – I really can't imagine a more nineties document than Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It fascinates me as a perfect time capsule of a decade I don't remember fondly, particularly in the way it treats gay men.

Jim Williams, whose killing of sex worker Danny Hansford is at the literal center of the book (it takes that long to get started!), comes in for a negative portrayal and seems like he deserves it. He's corrupt and narcissistic, one of those antiques collectors who don't understand why you keep morally loading all the Nazi shit they have around; he's a social climber, a nihilistic Gatsby whose revenge on society is to put himself at its pinnacle. At the same time, Williams in Berendt's hands just isn't very interesting. He's forever walking around rooms as if following stage directions, forebodingly telling the life stories of Georgia bluebloods in short declarative sentences. Berendt is on record as calling Williams "a brilliant and engaging storyteller [...] bitter, funny," so I'm afraid this is all him. That's where the '90s come in, though – centering a story on a boring gay man, one who sucks in a regular rich-person way, and yet insisting he's a Ripleyesque figure worth building a book around. Any earlier in mainstream literary history, a figure like this would be pathetic or monstrous. Any later, and he would be more human. Here, he's allowed to be an antihero, even though antihero is the only role available, even though he seems miscast.

It's a sweeping statement, but I'll commit to it with caution: in the 1990s, mainstream Americans began to entertain the idea that gay men were mortal, and that it was a bad thing for them to die young. This led to a general increase in empathy, even if that path led through community-theatre miscastings of this kind, in which the part of Richard III is played by a local historic preservationist. I don't think Midnight offers the same empathy to trans people or sex workers – Chablis is too stylized, Hansford too demonized – but it isn't a meaningless step. Nor is it exceptionally meaningful. In a year when forty thousand Americans died of AIDS, it is predictably shitty that so many of the living were reading a book about a gay killer.

I imagine the reader of 1994 picking up Midnight with a variety of motivations. A fondness for longform journalism, interest in a profile of an unusual city, the desire to have their ideas about the South challenged or confirmed. True crime is a reliable draw, especially true crime with a queer edge. But the book invites self-congratulation too, and I find this especially insidious. Berendt points out that Williams' rise to social prominence was partially the product of Savannah society congratulating themselves on their open-mindedness, letting in an "acceptable" homosexual to show they could move with the times. This is also a gift he offers to his readers, and for this reason, I'm afraid there's no statute of limitations on these dunks.