Smoke - Hardcover

Bradley, John Ed

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805024212 ISBN 13: 9780805024210

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1994

Synopsis

Where I come from, you hear a lot of stories - some of them actually true. There's one my mother likes to tell about the first time Carnihan and I met...
So begins John Ed Bradley's fourth and most accomplished novel. Like favorite stories from the past, Smoke creates a special world. Quick with incident and enriched by a large and colorful cast, it invites readers inside the sleepy, Brigadoon-like town of Smoke to linger and to love, while experiencing the delights and terrors of its wonderfully human people - storekeepers and short-order cooks, prostitutes and policemen, mothers and fathers, a writer and a wise billionaire (both on journeys of self-discovery), old-timers and the eternally green.
At the story's center are lifelong friends Pace Burnette and Jay Carnihan. Jay has succeeded his father as the proprietor of Hometown Family Goods, a retail relic caught in the rising sea of commercial uniformity. All across the nation, billionaire Rayford Holly's Monster Marts are driving the mom-and-pop operations out of business; Jay's fantasy is to kidnap Mr. Holly on one of his surprise inspection trips to the nearby mall and make him apologize for what he's done to America's small towns. Jay ("as wild a thing as there ever was in Smoke") puts it directly: "I just want to hear him say the words, 'I am sorry, Mr. Carnihan!'"
Jay and Pace readily achieve the kidnapping part, but extracting the apology isn't so easy. Rayford Holly turns out to be so confoundedly strange and likeable - quoting Walt Whitman, endearing himself to the dog, even tidying up Jay's museum of a store when he's not busy charming the lunch-counter trade - that it's not long before his special magic overwhelms Smoke.
With an abundance of wit and originality, the author has illuminated, strikingly, why we need friends, why we need enemies, and why we do not need regret. His narrative is as spicy as gumbo - rich and delicious with a powerful kick - and very funny. In Smoke, he has immortalized Main Street, U.S.A., at its last stand, Louisiana-Cajun style.

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Reviews

Bradley's evocation of the South acquires new depth and charm in his fourth novel, after Love & Obits . Here, childhood friends rediscover the magic of their small-town roots. In the late '80s, aspiring young author Pace Burnette, the sale of his first novel under his belt, returns from up north to his home to the bayou town of Smoke, La., with the vague hope of putting Smoke's ailing economy back on its feet while he collects accolades and churns out bestsellers. Pace's rebellious best friend, Jay Carnihan, heir to the town's ailing general store and lunch counter, has found a scapegoat for Smoke's business woes in Winston Rayford Holly, a charismatic Arkansas billionaire who has opened one of his nationwide Monster Marts on the outskirts of town. Holly's high-volume stores symbolize for Jay the destruction of small-town America. When Jay gets the chance to confront Holly and to enact his fantasies of retribution, he and Pace undergo an adventure that changes them forever. Bradley fills narrator Burnette's eponymous town with colorful, likable characters--his rendering of the crusty Holly is the novel's triumph. Occasional cliches and moments of treacle do not spoil this otherwise delightful homespun narrative.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Unlike his protagonist, Bradley (Love and Obits, 1992; The Best There Ever Was, 1990; Tupelo Nights, 1988) is no novice fiction writer. Yet this book, earnestly sentimental and totally lacking in irony, seems wet behind the ears. Pace Burnette, 28, has just finished his first novel and, flushed with anticipated success, returns to his hometown to await public acclaim and juicy Hollywood deals. Home is a small Louisiana town called Smoke, and most everyone there is something other than they seem--except Pace's parents and sisters, whose sheer goodness allows for outpourings of sticky prose. His father's eyes ``were green and smart, and in them I glimpsed what I'd always found in there, which is to say, a great store of love for me.'' His two ``beautiful'' sisters tell him, ``We're so lucky to have such a brother!...Why, we're the luckiest people alive.'' Such people frequently have ``warm, happy tears'' in their eyes. When not sharing tender moments with his cardboard family, Pace pursues beautiful Genie Monteleone, with whom he's been ``crazy mad goofy in love'' since they were in grade school. The fact that she's now a hooker doesn't squelch the flame; after all, she has a heart of gold. So, too, does Pace's best friend, Jay Carnihan, who, we are told, is ``the most mysterious resident the town had ever known.'' (He seems more like a poorly developed character.) Jay spends his time drinking, mooning over beautiful Bethany Bixler (a prevaricating store clerk with a heart of gold), and plotting to kidnap glutinous multimillionaire Rayford Holly, owner of the Monster Mart down the road that's killing his family store. The kidnapee, of course, turns out to have a heart of gold. These people need more lemon and less sugar in their lemonade. Still, despite the cloying world view, the novel is sort of fun to read. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Bradley's quirky tale of small-town life would probably have been better if he had taken the basic plot and melted it down into a short story, maybe 5,000 words that would fit nicely in Esquire. Instead, we get a long, repetitious, but occasionally amusing story of a fourth-generation small-town general-store proprietor named Carnihan and his novelist buddy, who conspire to kidnap the billionaire owner of a chain of Wal-Mart-like superstores, ostensibly to get him to apologize for destroying Main Street, U.S.A., by driving all the other local merchants out of business. In Bradley's very nice world, people are polite to one another, Carnihan and the billionaire (patterned after the late Sam Walton) become friends, and the local whores are all angelic. It's actually pleasant for a change to read something where no one is a jerk, but naturally this grows old rather quickly, especially because Bradley can't resist big gooey dollops of sentimentality. Joe Collins

Hometown Family Goods, a combination lunchroom-general store in Smoke, Louisiana, has seen better days. Jay Carnihan, the fourth generation of his family to run the store, blames its decline, as well as that of the entire downtown business district, on the local Monster Mart, one of a chain of gigantic department stores. Carnihan wants to kidnap Monster Mart's founder, who is America's richest man, and make him apologize for what he's done. Meanwhile, his best buddy, Pace Burnette (come home to await the publication of his first novel), has his own problems: he's fallen in love with an old schoolmate who now works at the local brothel. Is this a Southern Gothic tale full of vengeance, decadence, and the decline of old families? No, it's a hilarious farce about friendship, loyalty, love, and the dependence of people on one another. Bradley ( Tupelo Nights, LJ 5/1/88 and Love & Obits, LJ 1/92) knows his small towns and their people and foibles, and he knows also how to chuckle at the human condition.
-Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805024212
• ISBN 13: 9780805024210
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400