Telling her story at the end of the 20th century, Laydia Spain O'Hara, untangles the past of fourteen characters' lives tied together in a small southern Illinois town from the mid-1950s of Elvis through the mid-1960s after Kennedy's Camelot. Her comic tale of faces unmasking--and conflicts resolving--is a human journey about coming of age and inventing one's self despite all gossip while keeping the torch of true love burning. In a triangle with her two best friends, Jessarose and Mizz Lulabelle, Laydia Spain outwits convention, opens her own boarding house, and discovers a solidarity in new ideas of family, home, and the human heart that mirror the vast social changes sweeping American culture during the mid-century.
In the tradition of spunky small-town girls whose vernacular descends from Huck Finn, Laydia Spain dares to take on her own father, Big Jim O'Hara, the postman and accordion champ who named her Laydia Spain; Mister Henry Apple, the prescription-eating pharmacist who marries the bleach-blond Mizz Lulabelle; and Mister Wilmer Fox, the red-headed traveling salesman whose revolving returns to the little town of Canterberry always upset everyone's plans to live happily ever after.
Ultimately, the dark-skinned cinnamon girl, Jessarose, who takes off on the road to fame and fortune as a roadhouse blues singer, defines the direction of love, because, while "the human face is a limitless terrain that just pulls you right in....the geography of women is where nature itself takes course homeward bound, the long route or the short, the high road or the low."
Comic, good-humored, nostalgic, and as vivid as a fast-talking film script with music, Jack Fritscher's sixth book of fiction is lean writing laced with witty observations and a couple of tear drops of genuine human compassion. This is a real storyteller's tale--a very polished tale--of lively characters living in a specific place at a time that has reached the level of myth in American popular culture.
About the Author
JACK FRITSCHER'S 400 published short stories and feature articles have appeared in more than 25 magazines and in several anthologies of "Best-of-the-Year" stories. Of his 5 books of fiction, his best-selling novel, SOME DANCE TO REMEMBER, has been named a classic comparable to novels by Gore Vidal and James Baldwin, and yet is popular enough that critics have called it "the gay GONE WITH THE WIND." His newest collection of fiction is RAINBOW COUNTY AND OTHER STORIES; his new novel for 1998 is the romantic comedy THE GEOGRAPHY OF WOMEN. He is also the author of 4 nonfiction books, including the scandalous MAPPLETHORPE: ASSAULT WITH A DEADLY CAMERA; LOVE AND DEATH IN TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, his doctoral dissertation; the Anton LeVay centered POPULAR WITCHCRAFT; and the media-savvy TELEVISION TODAY. He is a founding member of the American Popular Culture Association, and has taught creative writing for more than fifteen years at university. He is the recipient of both a Michigan Grant to the Arts and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His coffee-table photography book, published in England and titled JACK FRITSCHER'S AMERICAN MEN, is a completely progressive kind of photo art, because his pictures (each one a titled short story) are of actual American males with none of the usual coffee-table pics of girlyman models leaning in shadows holding hula-hoops. He is deeply established artist who is writer, photographer, and video director whose wildly eccentric work reflects sexuality, intellect, and real life lived in American popular culture.
See all 2 customer reviews...
