Captain Saturday: A Novel - Hardcover

Inman, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316415022 ISBN 13: 9780316415026

Publisher: Little, Brown, 2002

Synopsis

When a nasty conglomerate buys his station and tosses him out, TV weatherman Will Bagget's seemingly perfect life collapses around him until Wingfoot Bagget, a long-lost cousin, arrives on his doorstep and takes him back to the New South, where Will must come to terms with his history in order to solve all the problems in his life. 18,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Inman is the author of three acclaimed novels, Home Fires Burning, Old Dogs and Children, and Dairy Queen Days. For 25 years, he was the TV anchorman on the number one station in Charlotte. He has two daughters and lives in Charlotte and Boone, NC with his wife.

Reviews

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.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Will Baggett has settled into a comfortable existence: he's a fixture of the Raleigh community as its most popular TV weatherman; his beautiful wife, Clarice, is a successful real estate broker; and his son, Palmer, is a medical student at UNC-Chapel Hill. Yet Will's seemingly perfect facade is destroyed when his news station is bought out and he is abruptly fired. This upset to his routine has a ripple effect: Clarice announces she wants a divorce, his relationship with Palmer is proven to be not as solid as he once believed, and Will finds himself accidentally embroiled in legal problems. As Will tries to reclaim his marriage and salvage his relationship with his son (by embarking in a lawn-care business from which the novel gets its name), he is forced to examine his own culpability in his downfall. Will makes a genial protagonist, and Inman (a former TV news anchor himself) includes charming, if occasionally two-dimensional, supporting characters. Although this novel doesn't cover any new terrain, readers will enjoy its diverting and uplifting story. Brendan Dowling
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316415022
• ISBN 13: 9780316415026
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464