I’ll support your first statement here, but I’ll blame it on him writing about people who scare him, because I think that’s more fundamentally the problem. If they didn’t scare him, he’d bother to learn more about them.
Well, I wasn’t planning to use it to talk about Lord of the Flies. 
The book I mentioned (Rika) is about a transformative experience (several of them, actually), although you could make a case that the important one does not happen to the protagonist and in fact occurs before the book starts.
Most memorably for me he was Captain Terrell, the leader of the Red Legs, in The Outlaw Josey Wales.
“Squeal like an orc!”
I have nothing grand or insightful to offer. I read an article several years ago in the New Yorker entitled ‘The Summer of Deliverance’ which, in typical New Yorker style, painted an intriguing picture of a very alcoholic James Dickey and the filiming of the movie, and dropped names all over the place. Because it was such an iconic book and film, I thought I’d better check it out so I knew what it was all about.
First I rented the movie and found it, not bad, but rather unmemorable; the plot itself isn’t something I’d normally look for in a plot when picking out a movie. Then I read the book and also found it… unmemorable. I remember long expository passages that were not very enthralling at holding my attention, and I knew the writing was weighty and full of symbolism, but found it uninteresting – just not my cup of tea at all.
I don’t disagree with the observations here; it’s extraordinarily helpful to hear what the true analysis is because I just could not get into the book, and I really do want to know what the author was “after”.
Not sure how much insight it gives, but James Dickey was a very disturbed individual who had problems with depression, substance abuse, and violent outbursts throughout his life. His son Christopher (a Newsweek correspondent and freelance writer) has written A LOT about his father and described a household that was dysfunctional as all hell and that became even worse when his first wife died and he married a much younger coke addict (his sons actually physically took their half-sister from the second marriage due to the neglect and endangerment from the household; James was often drunk, the mother usually stoned, and the marriage often violent). So, he probably wasn’t in a happy place when he wrote it.
It’s been 20 years since I read Deliverance BUT IIRC the book and movie are fairly close. Something I think is probably significant is that Dickey, as mentioned, was from an upper-middle class family in Atlanta, which made him Southern, but… not really. Atlanta would have been far more southern in personality under Jim Crow when Dickey was growing up, but ultimately it’s far more akin to other big cities than it is to the “real south” that surrounds it, and it’s a city with no soul or center; Atlanta’s a metropolis because it’s in a place where there needed to be a metropolis. It’s one of the first major cities built by railroads rather than rivers. I remember back in the 90s Absolut had an ad- most of you over 30 will remember them- where they did all kinds of tailored ads: “Absolut D.C.” would have an Absolut vodka bottle with a capitol dome, or Absolut NYC would have the Manhattan skyline with an Absolut bottle format, or Absolut L.A. with the Hollywood sign, etc… For Absolut Atlanta they made the bottle out of runways since Hartsfield Jackson International Airport was apparently the most Atlantan thing they could think of for the city. Not to malign the place- I love going to the Fox Theater and some of the other offerings, but it’s just somewhat lacking in personality compared to most other cities.
I think part of Dickey’s writing was about this, the getting away from the bland urban landscape of the homogenized south (Dickey was of the same generation as Flannery O’Connor, fellow Georgian who also wrote much about the southern landscape becoming increasingly more civilized but at the same time more barren) but in so doing returning to the beauty and majesty of the “unspoiled” south, then encountering the savage and violent horrors that were as much a part of the landscape as the whitewater and the mountains and the forests (because the south is soaked in blood more thoroughly- or at least more recently- than most areas and the wealthiest white families in Atlanta were seldom more than two or three generations from tin roof po’ white). The Interstates that gird Atlanta simultaneously shield it like the walls of Uruk from the barbarism, but also deprive of it any of the beauty and the uniqueness of the wilderness that surrounds it.
Of course I’ve never been good at literary explication so I could be wrong, and either way I’ll take a matinee at the Fox and a trip to Ikea any day of the week to getting ass raped by a greasy toothless hillbilly. (Lingonbery cola and Swedish meatballs… mmmm; mountain rape, baaaaad.)
As mentioned it’s been 20 years since I read the book so I don’t remember if he goes into the history of the region at all, but it’s one worth noting. North Georgia is sparsely populated, until recently was about 98% white (today there are a good many Hispanics and a few more other races there) and though it’s rarely taught in high schools it’s a place of vital importance in U.S. history. It was Indian territory (Cherokee mostly) protected by several treaties until the late 1820s when a major gold strike did the same thing to north Georgia it would do to California in 1849 and Deadwood in the 1870s, etc.: boom towns, violence, drifters, slaughter of Indians, whores, etc… At its height there was a U.S. mint there, the gold from North Georgia led directly to the Trail of Tears and other Indian removals as whites moved in from everywhere, most of the gold ended up going not to the miners but the investors (John Calhoun had major interests in the area) and the merchants, and then it died when the gold veins were gone (or rather when it became too expensive to mine the gold- there are still huge veins there but they’re far under the surface). There’s been a lot of gentrification there for the past few decades: B&Bs, vacation homes, rentals, kayaking and whitewater resorts, etc., though there’s also a lot of wilderness and really scary folks up there.
Today going from Atlanta to Dahlonega some weekends (especially during Oktoberfest due to the Bavarian tourist trap of Helen) can be a traffic jam. A lot of white collar bikers and well to do families have vacation homes there as well. When Deliverance was written this had begun but was nowhere near the extent that it is now.
Dickey was born in 1923, meaning that he would not have known any of the people involved in the Wild West Gold Rush Days, but he could very conceivably have known the people who knew them (e.g. if he knew someone born in 1865 and that person knew people born in 1805 when they were young) and knew the violent and unjust history of that region (which even then was a popular weekend villegiatura for the Atlantan bourgeoisie). While obviously he wasn’t writing historical fiction, he may well have taken into account the violent history of the region. (The hillbillies would be the descendants of the people who came there to strike it rich over the bodies of Indians forced off their land and just became hillbillies instead and defensive over the encroachment of gentility into their wilderness.)
The toothless hillbilly rapists in the movie always struck me as more of an Appalachian bogey than strictly a Georgia terror. In my own home state of Pennsylvania, poor whites just like them were/are far from uncommon. They have all the characteristics you’d expect: poverty, live in rural areas or isolated villages, apparently inbred, insular and suspicious of outsiders, an accent distinct from that of the more urbanized parts of the state. Poaching, moonshining (or pot growing or meth cooking), and other extra-legal sources of income are familiar to them.
Such folk are also common in our neighboring state of West Virginia. Not necessarily moreso than in PA, but common enough that West Virginia does seem to be the butt (heh) of a lot of Deliverance rape jokes.
My favorite of which is the t-shirt emblazoned “Paddle faster, I hear banjos!”
A fellow I know from another board refers to the people we’re discussing as “the sons of the Banjo.”
Y’know, we really don’t have to talk about hillbillies in the abstract. If you look around you might find that there are some on…this…very…BOARD!
::shudder::
I’m a whitewater paddler and I’ve been on many river trips in the southeastern US, with people of all backgrounds. I’ve often thought Deliverance would be a good candidate for a remake, only with realistic dialogue instead of actors who seem to be reading the novel to each other.
There is some hostility of locals towards outsiders. Here you are, living in some dirt poor rural area, trying to get by, and every time the water comes up a bunch of outsiders pour into the area in shiny new SUVs and expensive pick-ups. They have all kinds of expensive toys and act like they own the place. Maybe you are deeply religious and some of the outsiders are drinking and boisterous and tossing the F-bomb around after they get off the river.
Most locals are very friendly to paddlers but a small percentage have been known to expess their irritation through vehicle or campsite vandalism and break-ins. Local law enforcement has been known to target paddlers for alchohol and traffic violations as well.
As a banjo player, I am deeply offended by this characterization…
Ain’t you got a purty mouth on yew…