Divining Rod: A Novel - Hardcover

Knight, Michael Muhammad

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 052594379X ISBN 13: 9780525943792

Publisher: Dutton Adult, 1998

Synopsis

Sam Holladay shocks all who know him when he murders his neighbor, Simon Bell, but in a series of flashbacks, the motive for his crime, Simon's affair with his wife, is revealed. A first novel. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Knight has taught at the Gilman School in Baltimore and at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.

Reviews

It's an odd and touching novel, unassuming, cumulative in effect.... Knight's writing [is] understated, graceful, easy. At the same time, he is no stranger to the Southern Gothic tradition, which is to say he peoples his novel with characters whose eccentricities, at once comic and sad, are accepted and everyday.

Knight's assured first novel paints a touching picture of a quiet Alabama suburban neighborhood disrupted by tragedy. In contrast to the short stories in Dogfight (reviewed below), in which Knight carefully builds to a climactic one-two punch, here he opens with the knockout: 63-year-old Sam Halladay walks over to the house next door and pulls the trigger of a .38 revolver, killing 28-year-old Simon Bell. The motive: Bell's affair with Halladay's young, beautiful bride, Delia. Sketching the events leading up to Bell's death, Knight alternates Simon's flashback narration with third-person accounts centered around Sam and Delia Halladay, Sheriff Nightingale and Betty Fowler, an eccentric neighbor whose divining rod leads her to witness the crime. Knight's expert re-creation of the quotidian makes the bizarre events of his narrative all the more haunting. The questions he raises about what drives someone to adultery or murder remain rhetorical, even as he plants clues to their answers. Needy, restless Delia, for instance, is revealed through a childhood memory of a tree she once watched grow mangled by its ride in the torrent of an icy stream, and of her urge to follow it: "I think I wanted to see if I could outswim the current or come through that gap somehow undamaged." In smooth and graceful prose studded with arresting imagery and keenly observed details, Knight skillfully makes plausible the confluence of his characters' lives, the undercurrents of sadness and loneliness that connect them and their puzzlement as they try to understand how events and circumstances have led them to this crucial juncture.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"Knight's accomplished short fiction, collected in Dogfight and Other Stories, might have led one to expect a readable first novel, but hardly such a corker as Divining Rod," cooed the reviewer in the Seattle Times. LJ's reviewer begged to differ, calling this story of adultery "not terribly original" but concluding that "Knight can do betterAand he will." So watch for the next work.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dutton Adult
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 052594379X
• ISBN 13: 9780525943792
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256