| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9780618071685 | | Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company | | Publish Date: 11/1/2000 | | Buy.com Sku: 30641592 | | Item#: RHF76Q | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.75H x 5.75L x 1T | | Pages: 144 |
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| | | | At her kitchen table somewhere in the South, Powell's narrator embarks on a spirited and often hilarious imagining of certain historical figures and current national preoccupations. Ostensibly writing her grocery list, Mrs. Hollingsworth most happily loses her sense of herself until her family intrudes along with two petty criminals named Oswald and Bundy.
From the Publisher
At her kitchen table, somewhere in the South, Padgett Powell's narrator embarks on a spirited and often hilarious imagining of certain historical figures and current national preoccupations. Ostensibly writing her grocery list, Mrs. Hollingsworth most happily loses her sense of herself. Her list becomes a discovery of the things she has and those she lacks, including men -- even her own husband.
Mrs. Hollingsworth begins her list by imagining a lost-love story in which she is playful with and disdainful of the conventions of Southern Literature. Soon tiring of that, she decides to turn up her imagination. For reasons unclear to her, the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, an icon of the Lost Cause, rides into her tired lost-love story. He appears as a hologram created by a media giant, who aims to find the real New Southerner -- in a man who can recognize General Forrest's image. Into this surreal atmosphere enter Mrs. Hollingsworth's all too real daughters, the forgotten husband, the boys of the neighborhood, and petty criminals named Oswald and Bundy. Within this singular narrative collage, strong tenderness arises, with accounts of genuine lost love, both familial and wholly romantic.
From Publishers Weekly
There is a trick to reading Powell's evocative daydream of a novel: don't stop halfway across this swinging bridge between reality and the eponymous protagonist's phantasmic imagination. Don't stop and, above all, don't look down. Powell (Edisto; A Woman Named Drown) has a practice of subtly sliding--or suddenly snatching--what seems to be the landscape of his fiction from under the reader's nose and replacing it with something else entirely. Seated at her kitchen table somewhere in the South, the middle-aged Mrs. Hollingsworth is making a grocery list. Not a list of eggs and bread and detergent, but a list of people as diverse as Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, Lee Harvey Oswald and Ted Bundy, who appear in her head as holograms more real than her "indistinct" husband or her "Tupperware" daughters, who think she is losing her mind. In fact, she is writing down her jumble of thoughts in order to find her mental equilibrium and to make some sense of what is wrong with the world. Powell turns his eccentric vision on our common cultural conceits, for example: "the NPR rockettes... They were an army of presumers who presumed to legislate what everyone else did, thought, felt, should do, should think, should feel." Mrs. Hollingsworth conjures up General Forrest as the man to oppose the army of presumers. Yet there is a hint of romance on the battlefield in Mrs. Hollingsworth's head as she fights to win her skirmish with the surreal. Powell writes with clarity and grace about unseen territory, and his idiosyncratic humor succeeds in connecting the Civil War to the bizarre angst of a woman whose metaphysical "shopping list" will nourish herself and "whatever hungry fools came by to partake of her improbable food."
| | Read A Chapter | Excerpt Mrs. Hollingsworth likes to traipse. Her primary worry is thinning
hair, though this has not happened yet. She enjoys a solidarity with
fruit. She is wistful for the era in which hatboxes proliferated,
though a hatbox is not something even her grandmother may have owned.
More probably what she wants is hatboxes themselves, without the era
or the hats. But the proud, firm utility of the hatbox requires a hat
and an era for its dignity; otherwise it is a relic. She does not
want relics. Her husband is indistinct. She regards friendly dogs
with suspicion. Her daughters have lost touch with her, or she with
them, or both; it is the same thing, she thinks, or it is not the
same thing, which means it might as well be the same thing: so much
is pointless this way, indifferent, moot, or mute, as a friend of
hers says. Not a friend, but a friendly man whom she cannot bring
herself to correct when he says Click to read more... Excerpt Mrs. Hollingsworth likes to traipse. Her primary worry is thinning
hair, though this has not happened yet. She enjoys a solidarity with
fruit. She is wistful for the era in which hatboxes proliferated,
though a hatbox is not something even her grandmother may have owned.
More probably what she wants is hatboxes themselves, without the era
or the hats. But the proud, firm utility of the hatbox requires a hat
and an era for its dignity; otherwise it is a relic. She does not
want relics. Her husband is indistinct. She regards friendly dogs
with suspicion. Her daughters have lost touch with her, or she with
them, or both; it is the same thing, she thinks, or it is not the
same thing, which means it might as well be the same thing: so much
is pointless this way, indifferent, moot, or mute, as a friend of
hers says. Not a friend, but a friendly man whom she cannot bring
herself to correct when he says "mute" for "moot," for then she might
have to go on and indict his entire presumption to teach at the
community college, inspiring roomfuls of college hopefuls to
say "mute" for "moot" and filling them with other malaprops, and if
she indicts him on that presumption she"ll need to go on and indict
him for the presumption of his smug liberalism and for affecting to
like film as Art and not movies as entertainment and for getting his
political grooming from the smug liberalism and film-as-Art throat
clearing of National Public Radio, and all of this, since it would be
but the first strike in taking on the entire army of modest Americans
who believe themselves superior to other Americans (but not to any
foreigners, except dictators) mostly by virtue of doing nothing but
electing to think themselves superior - all of this would be unwise,
or moot, and indeed she may as well be mute, maybe the oaf was on to
something.
Copyright © 2000 by Padgett Powell(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men by Powell, Padgett Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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