The Acorn Plan Essay

The Acorn Plan by Tim McLaurin (1988) illustrates the unambiguous lives of the South East mill occupants. He focuses on the lives of Billy, Bubble and Ruby, their intangible dreams hardened by the inevitable reality, with the hope for something more. McLaurin does not soften the view of the South East mill occupants; he makes the readers fully aware of the stereotypes, as his characters fit all of the negative cliché’s associated with poor southerners. Critics of this book, such as Gary Davenport, have been skeptical of McLaurin’s’ depiction of these characters and are overall disappointed in his execution of the book. Conversely, critics such as Bledsoe, believes that McLaurin is successful in writing about the poor south reassessing the stereotypes
He shows the order of events, their consequences and the way the characters overcome the trails they are faced with. Davenport nevertheless believes that “A desire to experience authorial mismanagement at its worst is perhaps the only justification for reading Tim McLaurin’s The Acorn Plan.” (708). This is not the case; Davenport must not be accustomed to a sequenced order of events jumping from perspectives of different characters flowing in harmony with the plot. In the first page of the book McLaurin sets up the rest of the book so you know exactly how it will go. McLaurin writes; “Bubble Riley decided to drink all the wine in the world the night Billy cut the soldier’s lung in half” (1). Mismanagement not in the least, the book starts with Billy and the confrontation with cutting the man’s lung in half to subsequently being placed in jail. He gets out of jail after a couple of days, but is put on probation to make better decisions which in turn he does throughout the rest of the book. It shows the major events along with smaller ones that correspond with the plot. The other characters follow Billy’s’ story with their own stories flowing in harmony and even coinciding in certain