John Bentley Mays was born into one of the American South’s oldest families – that is who he is. Since 1980, he has been The Globe and Mail’s art critic – that is what he does. The distinction between the two is is key to understanding the nature of this memoir about blood roots and the personal search for “homeplace,” a connection to place through kin.

The urge to clearly define what it is to be “Southern” and the “Old South” (think cotton plantations, slaves, mammies, belles, and gentleman callers) versus the “New South” (industrialized, corporate, racist) is no less fraught now with complexity and confusion than it’s ever been. Mays does not seek to pigeonhole Southern culture – “Southernness” – by its standard traits: deep involvement in place, in family bonds, and in local tradition; a pervasive sense of humour even in the face of tragedy; a sense of impending loss; celebration of eccentricity; issues of racial guilt and of human endurance. Rather he states in the introduction that what he is after is the truth about what it is “to be human in a certain way. For Southerners, that way has always been defined by memory and the land….”

From Toronto, Mays returns to Southern soil to trace his ancestry back some 400 years. In researching his geneology, he hopes to ease the sense of homelessness modern society tends to instill and, in recalling the memories of the dead, “summon up lessons and warnings created in the course of living in a certain place, and examples of how our own moral living can be done.”

In describing his ancestor’s history, Mays also tells the South’s history from colonial days up to the Civil War and beyond. Enlarging the context however does not make the dense prose and convoluted narrative more compelling. The long passages of family tree descriptions (branch by branch) that make up the body of the text and surely, understandably, are of vital interest to the author, in the end don’t speak a language that is universally relevant.