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Dale R. Phillips My People's Waltz
Harper Perennial 2000 0380733366 / 9780380733361 Paperback Fine
0380733366 Amazon.com At first glance, Dale Ray Phillips appears to be cut from the classic Southern storyteller's cloth. That is, he's got a fine colloquial style, an assortment of Dixie-fried settings scattered throughout North Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas, and the sort of heightened, occasionally grotesque approach to character that seems to flourish below the Mason-Dixon line. But Phillips is much too talented a writer to pigeonhole. And My People's Waltz, which is billed as a collection of linked stories, is an extraordinary debut. We first meet Richard, the narrator, at age 8. In the wake of his mother's mental illness--which has caused her abrupt disappearance into a sanatorium--the miserable child has fallen into a state of muteness. "Not talking don't make you special," one young relative cautions him. Happily for the reader, though, Richard's silence leaves him no less observant: My grandfather kept his floozy in a silver Airstream above the bend in the river where the dead crossed over. He had finagled Miss Minnie a job as lifetime caretaker of a little patch of no-man's-land and a cemetery just across the Haw River. Whenever a black tenant farmer died, we watched from the trailer's picture window as a slipshod barge fashioned of dye-barrel pontoons and salvaged lumber ferried the coffin and mourners across the river to the grave. By the end of "Why I'm Talking," Richard regains his powers of speech. Yet his other wounds--the kind inflicted by the spectator sport of family life--are slower to heal. He grows up, comes to terms with his parents, and has his own trip through the wringer of love and marriage ("On Friday, Lisa points out that I've been drunk since signing the divorce papers"). What never fails him, or the reader, is the voice that Dale Ray Phillips has honed: eloquent, funny, and invariably forgiving. --William Davies --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. From Publishers Weekly Each of the 10 stories of this collection drew accolades when they first appeared in prominent literary journals, but reading them together reveals the way they meld into a darkly funny and lyrical narrative. With one exception, the stories follow narrator Richard chronologically from childhood through adolescence, into college, marriage, parenthood and divorce. Richard is a Southerner, a wanderer making and escaping homes from North Carolina to Arkansas to Texas and back. Indeed, the tug of geography is the one constant in Richard's life. He teaches college students that each person carries "a love map, a sketchy cartography formed in childhood which outlines the topography of the people to whom we will surrender our hearts." His grandfather, a retired judge, lives by the Haw River with a secret "floozy"; his traveling salesman father and suicidal mother torment themselves with their repeated separations and reconciliations; Richard himself marries up only to learn that upward mobility doesn't ease the difficult work of keeping love alive. Richard's people?hard drinking, smoking, carp-fishing, shady men and cuckolding, pliant women?hold onto one another long after love no longer works. In one memorable scene, Richard plays a game called "electricity" with his mother: he grabs a hot wire with one hand, his mother's hand with the other; as the conductor he feels nothing. The reader is not so grounded: Phillips's prose flashes powerful unpredictability with every delicious little shock. Author tour. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Price:
4.50 USD
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