m i s s i s s i p p i | c h u r n i n g William Faulkner and John Grisham battle it out for the soul of the South's most bookish city. B Y D W I G H T G A R N E R Illustration by Eric White OXFORD, Miss. -- While he was alive, William Faulkner never won any popularity contests here in his adopted hometown. The locals dubbed him "Count No Count" because of his dandified aloofness and lack of a steady job. He quit his position as postmaster because, he said, he "didn't want to be at the beck and call of every son-of-a-bitch with the price of a two-cent stamp." You can still walk into J.E. Neilson's department store, on Oxford's shady town square, and find a framed copy of Faulkner's testy response to a dunning note on a long overdue bill: "If this [$10 payment] dont [sic] suit you, the only alternative I can think of is, in the old Miltonic phrase, sue and be damned." Adding insult to injury, no doubt, was the fact that many here rarely understood a word their resident Nobel Prize-winner put to paper. On the other hand, Oxford's latest literary legend, the nice-guy thriller writer John Grisham, is nearly as famous here for having been a Little League coach and a Sunday school teacher as he is for being a novelist. A little amiability goes a long way in Oxford (pop. 10,300), and Grisham's cheerful disposition might help explain why, at midnight on a memorably nasty and wind-ripped night last week, while tornadoes were chewing up mobile-home parks in nearby Arkansas, Mary R. Minor and three of her friends were huddling against the driving rain outside of Square Books, Oxford's venerable independent bookstore. "We're always the first in line for Grisham's book signings," Minor says. "We don't mind getting a little wet." Minor and her friends are the founding members of a Grisham-worshipping club they like to call "The Horror of the Chamber" -- the name is a jokey reference to the fifth of their idol's eight novels -- a group that has been known to sprinkle something they call "Grisham holy water" on new recruits. ("Grisham got mad at us about that, so we stopped," Minor says. "He's very religious.") In any place other than Oxford, these middle-aged women's devotion to Grisham's legal potboilers might seem more than a little kooky. But by the next morning they will be joined by nearly 250 other keyed-up fans outside Square Books on Oxford's town square -- a public space that, with its elegant old brick buildings, could be plucked directly out of the last century. Each will be hoping to snag a ticket that will get them into that afternoon's signing of Grisham's new bestseller, "The Partner." It's not quite the second coming of Elvis -- who was born a short drive away in Tupelo -- but by 9 a.m., there's a giddy buzz in the air. This signing is a homecoming of sorts for Grisham, a longtime resident who was forced to flee Oxford in 1994 when, almost overnight, he became The Most Famous Writer in America. (The last straw, many residents say, was when he and his wife, Renee, awoke one morning to find a young couple taking their wedding vows on his front lawn.) Tired of being a walking tourist attraction, Grisham packed up his family and relocated to Charlottesville, Va. -- perversely enough, the same city Faulkner moved to when he finally abandoned Oxford. No one here holds this desertion against Grisham, who still maintains a palatial house just outside of town. When he strides into Square Books, a polite kind of pandemonium breaks out. Women blush deeply; men take a step back and gawk; video cameras blink on and whir. For not only are John Grisham's formulaic novels insanely successful -- his seven previous books have sold more than 60 million copies in 31 languages, and the five movies made from them have grossed some $750 million -- but he is, well, kind of sexy too. Nice-guy sexy. With his Don Johnson-esque stubble, his Dockers-brand chinos, and the dorky way his tie peeks out from under the rear collar of his denim shirt, he looks like what you might get if you put Cal Ripken, Garth Brooks, Dan Quayle and Harrison Ford into a blender and pressed the "puree" button. He happily signs books for nearly four hours. The good cheer at Square Books can't hide the pesky fact, however, that Grisham remains a controversial figure, even in absentia, among Oxford's entrenched old-guard literary community. It's not that the town's disproportionately large population of novelists, poets and editors don't like the man. Despite some grousing about his prose skills -- the local novelist Barry Hannah has called him a writer for "lip-readers" -- they do. "There's no getting around the fact that John is just a plain old nice guy," says novelist Cynthia Shearer, author of last year's acclaimed "The Wonder Book of the Air" and curator of Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak. Shearer also notes that many writers in town have benefited from Grisham's philanthropy, which has included the funding of a visiting writer series at the University of Mississippi, the purchase of a financially troubled literary magazine called the Oxford American and a large donation toward the restoration of Rowan Oak. March. 12, 1997

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