Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

Well. I remember seeing the movie made of this book in the theaters, and I'd seen the book around here and there, but I didn't read it until now, after Sara found it in a Little Free Library and grabbed it. It's not a badly-written book, though the structure of it means it takes a while to get to what it wants to tell you. I do not think Mr. Berendt liked Savannah much--there's no way one depicts a city as the kind of shithole Savannah is in the book by accident--and I think there's exactly one character in the book Berendt liked, and it's not himself: Chablis is the closest thing the book has to a sympathetic named character (there's an unnamed old guy at a party who absolutely nails all of Savannah's shit to the wall, he's also pretty cool) and I'm not sure that's so much that Berendt liked her, exactly, as that the Black trans woman is much more sympathetic to a reader in 2023 than she probably was to the writer in the 1980s.