Word: edisto
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...Your brain can get out of hand," says one character in Typical (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 207 pages; $19). Another figures that "character is nothing but warts." Judging from these 23 fictions, both statements are correct. Padgett Powell's two previous books, both novels (Edisto, A Woman Named Drown), exhibited a unique gift for regional American comedy. This sparkling collection reduces his scope without limiting his style. Dr. Ordinary is anything but: "He found God with no difficulty, but locating his belief another matter." Miss Resignation "liked football and was absolutely certain that she could have been an excellent off-tackle...
Author Padgett Powell, 35, has weathered this ordeal nicely. To be sure, a few readers will complain that his second novel fails to live up to the promise of Edisto, which drew raves and comparisons to Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye when it appeared in 1984. A Woman Named Drown is not going to remind anyone of Anna Karenina. On the other hand, Powell's new book picks up smoothly where its predecessor left off, which is not, given the level of skills evident throughout Edisto, a bad place to begin...
Happily, all of that furious and frantic preparation, from Edisto, S.C., to Eastport, Me., turned out to be a storm before a comparative lull. After G hour had come and gone, first on the barrier islands off North Carolina and last in upper New England, all of what the newspaper people call aftermath reports had a wonderful quality about them. They all more or less said whew! To be sure, Gloria's pummeling, up-the-coastline meander left a wake of damage and sorrow. Seven deaths could be traced to the storm. At least half a million people were forced...
...EDISTO by Padgett Powell. A teen-age boy, wise beyond his years, recalls a complex adolescence on a sea island off the coast of South Carolina...
...FICTION: Edisto, Padgett Powell God's Pocket, Pete Dexter ∙ Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon Sweeney Astray, Seamus Heaney Testing the Current, William McPherson ∙ The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera...