Captain Saturday: A Novel

Publishers Weekly

At once deeply affecting and warmly humorous, this fourth novel by Inman (Dairy Queen Days) faintly echoes the bittersweet inflections of such literary forebears as Flannery O'Connor. After 20 years of minor celebrity as a TV weatherman, Will Baggett is fired when the station is sold to a conglomerate. While rushing to meet a deadline to collect his $50,000 contract buyout, he injures his knee. A photo of him on an EMS gurney winds up on the front page of the newspaper, the headline charging him with running a red light and resisting arrest; he's now not only out of a job, but also unemployable in the only professional persona he has ever known. Meanwhile, Will's marriage grows ever more shaky as his wife establishes a successful career in upscale real estate by cozying up to her boss. Retreating to the homestead of his eccentric cousins, Will (now Wilbur again) licks his wounds and contemplates both his past and future. When he returns to face the traffic charges, he unluckily wears his medical-student son's jacket to court and winds up charged with possession of marijuana a felony offense in North Carolina. Wilbur soon discovers that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Only a couple of years shy of age 50 and suddenly an unemployed ex-con after a brief stay in jail, Wilbur now has to reconstruct his identity. Peopled with vivid, endearingly quixotic characters and filled with dead-on insights into a shallow New South that defines itself by club memberships and designer labels, this richly textured epic is a paean to the vagaries of the human heart. Southern author tour. (Jan. 8) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

As Inman's latest novel amply demonstrates, being Southern is all about family where you're from, how long your family has lived there, and who your parents and grandparents are. Will Baggett is one of the Wilmington, NC, Baggetts, but his history was snatched away at age 13 when his parents were killed in an airplane accident. Now in his forties, Will is the Channel 7 weatherman and the most recognizable face in Raleigh. He is married to a Greensboro Palmer (quite out of his league), and he is very content until circumstance, misjudgment, and bad luck strip away the facade he has lived behind for 25 years. Returning to his roots, Will discovers what it is like to belong. Inman (Dairy Queen Days) knows the ins and outs of Southern family life and the ties it imposes even on those who rebel against it. In stark contrast to Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again, Inman's novel develops the theme that the Southerner never gets away. People with strong family connections will recognize whereof he speaks. Recommended for public libraries. Thomas Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

In another beguiling tale of life in the New South, a man learns some hard truths when he's fired and his life seems to be in free-fall. In his 40s, with a perfect job, happily married to Clarice, his son Palmer in medical school, Will Baggett thinks he has everything. Which means he's set for a terrible fall as hubris, always prickly about complacency, steps in to teach Will some painful lessons. Along the way, Inman ("Dairy Queen Days, 1997, etc.) introduces a passel of colorful characters, among them the protean lawyer Morris deLesseps, who recently wore buckskins but is now in a professorial tweed-jacket phase; Peachy Delchamps, an aspiring country singer as well as basketball player, who invented the famous "Peachy Pump"; and Will's father, charming Tyler, who made his living "fleecing suckers." The popular weather forecaster for a Raleigh TV station, Will takes his job seriously-he speaks at schools and garden clubs, and he checks out the malls so as to be available for his fans. He's that rare creature, a seemingly happy man-until his station is bought and he's fired. On his way to get his severance package, he's stopped for running a light and has to appear in court; Clarice locks him out and demands a divorce; and when he goes to court, wearing his son's jacket by mistake, drugs are found in the pocket, and he's sent to the slammer. Will, whose parents died in a plane crash when he was 13, realizes, when cousin Wingfoot brings him back to the decaying family home, that he has never allowed himself to mourn them. But Will is strong and resilient; virtually destitute, he starts up a lawn-care business, and, over the summer, not only learns more about himself and his wife and sonbut begins to find that "other life" that Wingfoot says everyone has. Ruefully wise. It warms and cheers like the best kind of southern comfort.