Quite a Year for Plums: A novel - Hardcover

White, Bailey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679445315 ISBN 13: 9780679445319

Publisher: Knopf, 1998

Synopsis

Anyone who has read the best-selling Mama Makes Up Her Mind or listened to Bailey White's commentaries on NPR knows that she is a storyteller of inimitable wit and charm. Now, in her stunningly accomplished first novel, she introduces us to the peculiar yet lovable people who inhabit a small town in south Georgia. Meet serious, studious Roger, the peanut pathologist and unlikely love object of half the town's women. Meet Roger's ex-mother-in-law, Louise, who teams up with an ardent typographer in an attempt to attract outer-space invaders with specific combinations of letters and numbers. And meet Della, the bird artist who captivates Roger with the sensible but enigmatic notes she leaves on things she throws away at the Dumpster ("This fan works, but it makes a clicking sound and will not oscillate").

Heartbreakingly tender, often hilarious, Quite a Year for Plums is a delectable treat from a writer who has been called a national treasure.

About this title

Review

Bailey White's intimate vignettes of small-town life are loosely held together by their subjects, who are themselves tightly held together by love, family, and idiosyncrasy. This episodic mode, which has made her a favorite on National Public Radio, suits her just as well as a novelist. In Quite a Year for Plums, even the temporary denizens of her fictional southern Georgia town have their oddities: a bird artist is obsessed by a vanishing breed of chickens and has nightmares about chicken feet, while another dreams night and day of typography. He compares, for instance, the Mistral font to George Hamilton and laments the bastardization of Bodoni. It is perhaps the Gill Sans typeface that most raises his aesthetic hackles: "They shorten the uppers, they enlarge the counters, they round off the angles, they make it soft and slack. They castrate it!" (Suffice it to say that his partner in lamentation is a woman who fervently believes in little spacemen of the nonhuman variety.)

In addition to the extraterrestrialite, the permanent townsfolk include a pair of retired schoolteachers who have been reading aloud to each other for 50 years each Thursday in May. Why Thursday? Why only May? White doesn't let us in on that secret: she's reluctant to intrude too much on her characters' habits and hobby horses, even though they are happy enough to intrude on one another. What concerns these eccentrics above all is plant pathologist and banjo picker Roger Meadows, whom men and women alike admire. "Perhaps because of his years of walking in densely planted fields of tobacco and peanuts," White describes him at one social event, "Roger had a graceful way of moving through a crowd, gently slipping between the people as if they were sticky, floppy leaves that he must not bruise." A photo of him comparing sick and healthy peanut plants is the closest thing the place has to a pin-up. Even his ex-wife's aunt has one on her refrigerator: "On the white of Roger's shirt Eula printed R-O-G-E-R in proud capital letters, with the final R dipping down out of consideration for the roots of the healthy peanut plant."

Above all, his peers would like Roger to settle down with the right woman, in the wake of his failed marriage to the town's belle dame sans merci. Alas, when he falls under the spell of an inappropriate candidate--the aforementioned bird artist--they seem to know it won't last. But White describes this unusual romance with such sweetness and generosity that the reader hopes differently. Quite a Year for Plums is filled with strange social convergences, quiet comedy, and understated tragedy. The author has an eye--and, of course, ear--for the telling detail and the decisive, domestic moment.

From the Back Cover

"White will transport readers to that place where the language is languid, the bees hum . . . and everybody-- in a nice kind of way--is a little off-kilter." --San Francisco Chronicle

"An enchanting work, as delicately stitched as a spider web." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"A novel of many perspectives. . . . On one level, Quite a Year for Plums is about chickens and peanut cultivars and pine- straw fires; on another, it's about art and impermanence and freedom." --The New York Times Book Review

"Deliciously funny. . . . As tasty as a 12-egg poundcake, pungent as tea olive and crafty as a crow." --Atlanta Journal-Constitution

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679445315
• ISBN 13: 9780679445319
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 220