Laughing Place - Hardcover

Durban

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684192586 ISBN 13: 9780684192581

Publisher: Scribner, 1993

Synopsis

Emotional ties, secrets, and wounds pervade a prominent southern family. Annie returns home to Timmons, South Carolina, to comfort her mother following her father's recent death. But Timmons, like most of the South, is not as she left it. Award-winning author Durban also wrote All Set About with Fever Trees.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Like the town they live in, Timmons, South Carolina, the Vesses are a peaceful model family. John Vess, attorney and pillar of the community, and Louise, his devoted wife, have conducted their lives seamlessly in a house that has belonged to the Vesses for generations. Now young, recently widowed Annie Vess has come home to comfort her mother after the shocking insult of he father's sudden death. But things are not the way Annie left them; Timmons is changing. A dam has flooded thousands of acres to create an artificial lake, Annie's cousin Mel is about to marry a man of highly questionable character, her mother seems to be relinquishing her common sense (and her soul) to a born-again sentimentality, and the old colonel next door is sinking inexorably into senility. Perhaps most alarming of all, Annie's memories of her father, valiant defender of lost causes, is threatened by her discovery that he led a double life. And Annie, for the first time since the death of her husband, embarks on a thrilling - and fearsome - love affair with a compellingly mysterious man. By turns comic and dark, Durban's portrait of a family under siege becomes a meditation on the South's obsession with continuity and tradition. Lyrical, wise, and achingly tender, here is a novel about that place in all our hearts called home.

Reviews

A young widow learns that the past cannot be recaptured in this deeply felt first novel about the New (and the Old) South. Annie Vess returns to Timmons, S.C., after her father's death and quickly sinks into a profound depression. Everything she remembers from her childhood is gone: the family's 500 acres of land are sunk beneath a man-made lake; their fortune has mysteriously disappeared; her mother has become a born-again Christian; Timmons society has been overwhelmed by nouveau riche real estate developers, most notably her cousin's sexy, aggressive fiance Canady. Although she is still haunted by her husband's memory, the needy and confused Annie plunges into a romance with Legree Black, a photographer and ecologist she meets by chance in the town graveyard. Only when she learns that her father and relatives are not the people they pretended to be can she begin her life anew. Award-winning short story writer Durban ( All Set About with Fever Trees ) blends the gritty realism of Dreiser with the lyrical sadness of a southern gothic, describing the shift between "this world where we trusted that change was orderly and slow, and another world where the most terrible and permanent things could happen in an instant." A challenging and laudable debut.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Within a year of each other, Annie Vess and her mother become widows. Thirty-two-year-old Annie moves back home to Timmons, South Carolina, a quintessential small Southern town replete with Confederate war memorials and kudzu vines. Mother and daughter, both fragile and in need of tenderness, create a circle of wariness between them. When Annie investigates her father's past, especially his obsessive campaign to halt a local lake project, she uncovers a trail of betrayal and deception. In her first novel, Durban excels in the richly metaphorical and cerebral portrayal of her main character, Annie. She is less successful in making Annie's once-adored father a believable character. Legree, Annie's new love interest, whom she "leans toward the way you'd lean out of an open window on a beautiful day," is more fully sketched; their conflicts seem contrived, but Annie's resultant intense brooding keeps the reader ensnared. Durban rises above a mire of hackneyed Southern stereotypes and vividly portrays an idiosyncratic world Annie defines as "so broken and so full of promise."-- Keddy Ann Outlaw, Harris Cty. P.L., Houston
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684192586
• ISBN 13: 9780684192581
• Binding: Board book
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352