Where It All Goes Down
Skully's Landing, Noon City
Other Voices, Other Rooms, most definitely takes place in the Southern United States. You can almost taste the sweet tea. It's somewhere near New Orleans and Ponchartrain, Louisiana, because that's where Joel is from and he and Aunt Ellen seem to be able to make the trip to Skully's Landing in a day. The town of Noon City is, according to the narrator, "not much to look at" (1.1.59):
There is only one street, and on it are located a General Merchandise store, a repair shop, a small building which contains two offices, one lodging a lawyer, the other a doctor; a combination barbershop-beautyparlor that is run by a one-armed man and his wife; and a curious, indefinable establishment known as R. V. Lacey's Princely Place where a Texaco gasoline pump stands under the portico. (1.1.59)
The one-street town is nothing compared to New Orleans, Joel's hometown.
Now, given that Noon City is not much to look at, imagine the isolation of Skully's Landing, which is outside of Noon City and which most Noon City-ites never go near. Miss Roberta calls it "The Skulls," but won't say why. Sounds ominous, anyway. The Landing itself is a rundown, old plantation, filled with eccentric characters. The place reflects the weirdness of the people who live inside of it:
It was not a result of simple neglect, this tangled oblong area, but rather the outcome, it appeared, of someone having, in a riotous moment, scattered about it a wild assortment of seed. Grass and bush and vine and flower were all crushed together. Massive chinaberry and waterbay formed a rigidly enclosing wall. (1.2.32)
The idea of neglect and riotousness mix together to create a wild chaos in the landing and in the psyches of Amy, Randolph, Ed, and, possibly, Joel. Just as the plants are "all crushed together," the inhabitants of Skully's Landing seem suffocatingly close, unable to escape one another. The "rigidly enclosing wall" reflects the control Randolph has over everyone on the place, keeping them close to him and never letting them leave.