The gaudy place - Softcover

Chappell, Fred

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0151345902 ISBN 13: 9780151345908

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973

Synopsis

Violence and sex in a small Southern city. Arkie, Clemmie, Oxie, and Johns are linked by a schoolboy's prank. Arkie, Clemmie, and Oxie are three of a kind: cons who grub for small change. They have no history and no future. Johns is their counterpart in a brighter universe. His thievery is sanctioned because he's Family in a small Southern city. Arkie: Suddenly it occurred to him that this street, Gimlet Street, could take you anywhere in the world, it was joined to all the other streets there were. He shook his head, grinning. This was his territory. He was chained to Gimlet and he was chained to Clemmie, that green-eyed girl he was so helplessly in love with. Fred Chappell is a past Poet Laureate of North Carolina.
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About this title

From the Back Cover

Fred Chappell's The Gaudy Place is perhaps the first novel to depict the society of the street people of the New South and their relationship to the middle class. For its wry portrayal of displacement and injustice this novel was awarded the Sir Walter Raleigh Prize. The street-smart teenager Arkie triggers the events of the story with his ambition to rise in economic status. He proposes business deals to the prostitute Clemmie and the successful con man Oxie, a hustler who aspires to political office. When the prank of a middle-class teenager, Linn Harper, offers Oxie the surprising opportunity to gain a foothold in respectable society, an unexpected climax reveals the interdependence of all social levels in a culture too quickly changing from a rural to an urban character. Here is a small world in which quick wits and wily survival skills are necessary and admirable, even though the race is not always to the swift. Originally published in 1973, The Gaudy Place is drily humorous, darkly ironic, fast-moving, and entertaining. Its best strength is its gallery of sharply drawn, fondly observed characters unknowingly at odds with one another.

About the Author

Fred Chappell, born in Canton, North Carolina, is the author of numerous books of poetry as well as six novels, including I Am One of You Forever and Brighten the Corner Where You Are. The recipient of many honors, including the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, he teaches at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
• Publication date: 1973
• ISBN 10: 0151345902
• ISBN 13: 9780151345908
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 178