Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
by John Berendt
read by Jeff Woodman
written 1994, read 1996

I remember really enjoying this book back when I read it when it was first published but since I recently listed to Brendt’s next book City of Falling Angels, I realized that I couldn’t actually remember any of the actual details about this book, so I should listen to it next. This is his more famous/successful book that got turned into a movie released in 1997, which I also watched for the first time this week.

This book is set in Savannah, Georgia in the 1980s, and it’s very much a story of a time and a place as much as a story of the characters. It’s more or less nonfiction, ie, the people are real and the events are real, but Berendt in his narration plays fast and loose with his own position in the story and exactly what order the events happened in. There’s an extremely idiosyncratic cast of characters and a city that’s caught up in it’s own long history as an old Southern city with an ingrained concept of proper ettiquette, a strict racial divide and only the beginnings of gay pride.

The book is an introduction to a little-known city filled with peculiar but fascinating characters and a culture that’s developed from being caught up in it’s own history, filled with fancy manners, warm welcomes, ingrained exclusions, endemic violence, and ruthless social standards. Some of the main characters include: Joe Odom is an extremely charismatic southern gentleman who is a hub of society despite being a perennial conartist. The Lady Chablis is an extremely beautiful and outgoing black trans showgirl / dragqueen who loves making an impression and leaving chaos in her wake. Jim Williams is a rags-to-riches antique dealer who believes in psychic powers, puts on the most elaborte Christmas parties in the city, and is surprised to be charged with murder when he shoots and kills his much younger, male hustler lover.

To the extent that there’s a plot, the book covers the four trials for murder of Jim Williams, as he’s repeatedly found guilty and appeals. What the truth is, is very much in doubt. What the book tells are the many stories that are recounted, and the many characters who may or may not (and many are not at all) impacted by those cases.

It’s a fascinating and fun book, and I do recommend it, but I also think City of Falling Angels was better.

The movie, on the other hand, was rough: the scriptwriter took a meandering set of character studies and nearly a decade of events and tried to shoe-horn them all into a standard Hollywood plot template complete with romantic secondary plot. While it was full of cameos from the real people playing themselves, it was the professional actors who gave the most wooden performances. It was kind of shockingly bad. It did make me think that the time might be ripe for a remake as a mini-series.