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Overview
The strangeness of life and death play out in a fictional American small town
Lyla Mae Muncy meets her first love at Falls Creek Baptist Assembly Summer Bible Church Camp—and regrets it on their awkward first date. After years of being nagged about lumpy gravy, abused wife Lois pulls out a shotgun to wrap up breakfast her way. In a tender moment, an old man speaks from beyond the grave about his wife’s final goodbye at his funeral. Experience, memory, and town-consciousness bind this collection of ten stories spanning twenty-five years in fictitious Cedar, Oklahoma. From the fears and discoveries of childhood, through the revelations of adolescence, into the troubled years of adulthood and decline into old age and death, Rilla Askew uncannily makes each of her characters’ experiences our own.
Synopsis
Lyla Mae Muncy meets her first love at Falls Creek Baptist Assembly Summer Bible Church Camp—and regrets it on their awkward first date. After years of being nagged about lumpy gravy, abused wife Lois pulls out a shotgun to wrap up breakfast her way. In a tender moment, an old man speaks from beyond the grave about his wife's final goodbye at his funeral. Experience, memory, and town-consciousness bind this collection of ten stories spanning twenty-five years in fictitious Cedar, Oklahoma. From the fears and discoveries of childhood, through the revelations of adolescence, into the troubled years of adulthood and decline into old age and death, Rilla Askew uncannily makes each of her characters' experiences our own.
Publishers Weekly
The regional voices in these 11 interrelated, canny stories are protean and riveting as they record the ``strange business'' of death and the fleetingness of life in the fictional town of Cedar, Okla. Opening with Native American recollections of bloody strife among whites and several Choctaw factions in 1892, debut author Askew titles each subsequent tale with a year from 1961 to 1986. The white settlers' descendants, young and old, are heard from. Little Cephus of ``1964'' covets a playmate's pet raccoon and dreams it has died. Self-conscious teenager Lyla Mae cringes on her awkward first date with a boy she met at Bible camp (``1967''); in ``1968,'' she crawls from her window with her worldlier California cousin Nikki to drive with the town youths till dawn. In ``1981,'' an old man speaks tenderly from beyond the grave about his wife's farewell at his funeral. Emerging gradually over three stories is the figure of D. H. DeWitt, first seen in ``1968'' as he roars through the streets in his pickup truck, egging Lyla Mae and Nikki to steal watermelons and landing in jail. A hung-over D. H. attends the funeral of a friend killed in Vietnam (``1970''), while ``1983'' sees a fatuous, lonely D.H., now a snake wrangler, toting his unpredictable pet into a bar to shock the patrons--with catastrophic results. In unfolding this fertile character especially, Askew reveals tantalizing novelistic potential. (July)