Melts in the Hand, Not in the Mouth

BOTH OF ALEC WILKINSON'S book titles begin with the letter "m": his first was Midnights, and his most recent is Moonshine. But don't let the two m's confuse you.

The first one melts in your mouth, the second in your hand.

The New Yorker must have taught Wilkinson not to mess with success--why else would he use two two-syllable, nine-letter m-titles for his first two books? John McPhee has been writing about the same slice-of-life for all these years--why shouldn't Wilkinson?

He should. In Moonshine, however, Wilkinson makes a fundamental mistake. Perhaps he dropped his recipe for success while he was wandering around in the woods looking for stills under a midnight moon, but he lost it somehow--and the magic of his first book with it.

After graduating from Yale in the early '70s, Wilkinson joined the police force of the small summer community that he had been visiting every July and August since he was a youngster. He began his new career in Wellfleet, Mass., as a special summer officer. He stayed through the season, got a more permanent position, saw the town's population shrink from 15,000 back to 2000 and began to get a glimpse of the real routine of small-town police work.

He worked the midnight shift, driving aimlessly up and down Main Street, Commercial Street, Route Six and the countless back roads of the small community, hoping to avoid showdowns, weighing his responsibility to enforce the law against his fear of confrontation and his unpreparedness. (No one ever showed him how to fire his revolver.)

When he told the tale of his year of graveyard shifts in Midnights, he delivered a fascinating collection of true but unbelievable tales: your basic Yalie-turned-officer-of-the-peace stuff. The particular charm of the book was not only its simple and personal prose but the cultural clash it revealed as the outsider struggled to serve and protect the inbred and stern townspeople.

Wilkinson remained unarmed in his struggles to help police the town, not only because he didn't know how to fire his gun, but because he realized that he was an interloper in a community that, after decades and decades of summer swelling, had little room for outsiders.

In Midnights Wilkinson was a self-conscious visitor, living life on the edge, discovering the seamy underside of Wellfleet. And while the little town was hardly bristling with sordid tales, the book is a fascinating study.

WILKINSON'S NEWEST work, Moonshine, tries to do the same thing, unfolding the story of Garland Bunting, "probably the most successful revenue agent in the history of a state that has been enormously productive of moonshine."

More smalltown life, more downhome flavor and more down and dirty in America's backwaters. North Carolina bootlegging is an intriguing subject and Garland Bunting may be one of the most fantastic Americans alive.

But Wilkinson didn't spend a year with Bunting, and this may be his greatest problem. He made several trips to Scotland Neck, N.C., but the minutely detailed reporting of Midnight is missing in Moonshine. Wilkinson became a part of Wellfleet, and described it with authority. The backwoods of Carolina aren't such comfortable turf for him; no number of summers on the Cape could have prepared him for the people and the culture he found there.

Midnights might as well have been scribbled on the back of an old Dairy Queen bag in the squad ear as he sat alone at 3 a.m., keeping a sleepy eye on the radar gun he had trained on the highway. Moonshine is written by a city-slicker on his Macintosh in his Manhattan studio after he returned from going down south to find out how the country mice live.

Garland Bunting has been on the circuit recently plugging the book for Wilkinson and he presents an absolutely intriguing figure. His speech is priceless, but the printed word can't do justice to the oral history qualities of his "talking trash," for example shocking a waitress by ordering

Pork chops, chicken chops, cabbage, and ham.

Beef steak, stew beef, roast, and lamb.

Green tomatoes and black-eyed peas,

Sweet potatoes and all kinds of teas.

Wilkinson has to rely on snippets like this and bombard the reader with 16-page quotations that lose their vigor as the ink dries on the page. I want to see the Garland Bunting that told David Letterman he wasn't concerned that his livelihood as an undercover agent was threatened by an appearance on national television. No, after all these years, Bunting told Letterman that after more than 30 years of law enforcement, a little national exposure might add a little challenge and make his conniving games more interesting.

Wilkinson stands too much in awe of Bunting and can't quite capture the presence and spontaneity he exuded on national TV. Wilkinson goes all the way to Scotland Neck to write, "Standing alone and calling them in the dark, he looked like a figure out of history."

When Bunting and Wilkinson do go out on a stake-out together as the book concludes, the author approaches the more familiar ground of the Midnights chronicles. But the effort is abortive, the incident doesn't amount to much and leaves the reader teased and frustrated and no more satisfied.

Bunting, in fact, seems bored by his city-slicker of a biographer. He wants to be off alone hunting coons or chasing down moon-shiners--anywhere.

Anywhere but talking to The New Yorker.