Understanding Women - Hardcover

Smith, C. W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0875651895 ISBN 13: 9780875651897

Publisher: TCU Press, 1998

Synopsis

It’s 1956, and James Robert (Jimbo) Proctor has just turned sixteen when his Uncle Waylan and his new wife Vicky invite Jimbo to spend a summer toiling in the New Mexico oil patch. Jimbo dreams that heaving heavy metal about will serve as well as a Charles Atlas course to make a man of him, but he lands smack dab in a domestic fracas that has his uncle living in his machine shop and sneaking out with Sharon, his secretary.

Meanwhile Jimbo’s Aunt Vicky leads a protest against a fundamentalist book ban and rails against American H-bomb tests on Bikini. James sets out to solve the case of what he calls The Hardy Boy and the Mystery of the Marital Estrangement, but when he meets Sharon's cousin, Trudy, and plummets into love himself, the mystery of what brings men and women together or keeps them apart only deepens into confusion and torment.

And James has more to learn than why we love and how we earn a mate both deserved and deserving. He’s coming of age in a pivotal year in an era of repression and transition: the Brown decision, hardly two years old, meets die-hard resistance among segregationists; Rosa Parks has just refused to take a back seat; playwright Arthur Miller marries Marilyn Monroe and gets a contempt citation from the House Un-American Activities Committee; Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver lose in a landslide to Ike and Dick Nixon; Ed Sullivan claims he’ll never let “Elvis the Pelvis” on his TV show; and a southern senator warns Americans against the insidious influence of “foreign” films. In Jimbo’s hometown of Dallas, right-wing complaints of “Red” artists succeed in censoring a traveling art show sponsored by the United States Information Agency; civil defense drills sweep the nation to prepare Americans for nuclear war; sponsor General Electric withdraws an episode of the wildly popular drama “Medic” because it reveals too much about a Caesarean section; and abortions are so forbidden even descriptions of them are stricken from books.

How such things—things he might’ve thought remote and irrelevant—come to bear heavily on his green life is the thrust of his summer's education, and he leaves New Mexico on the cusp not so much of manhood but of adult responsibility.

About this title

About the Author

C. W. Smith is the author of the novels Thin Men of Haddam, Country Music, The Vestal Virgin Room, Buffalo Nickel, and Hunter’s Trap, as well as a collection of short stories—Letters from the Horse Latitudes—and the memoir, Uncle Dad. A reporter, film critic, and free-lance journalist, he was a recipient of the Dobie Paisano Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of Texas and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. In addition, he has received several awards for his short stories. A member of PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters, he has served on the Literature Panel of the Texas Commission on the Arts. Smith is currently a professor of English at Southern Methodist University.

Reviews

A time of book banning, red baiting and the denial of a woman's right to an abortion, Smith's 1950s are a dismal era redeemed only by their proximity to the 1960s. The two decades clash in the persons of lovers, husbands and wives in this uneven, heavy-handed Southwestern coming-of-age story. In 1956, 16-year-old Texan Jimbo Proctor is invited by his redneck Uncle Waylan and Waylan's second wife, left-leaning schoolteacher Vicky, to spend the summer working in a New Mexico oil patch. The boy leaps at the opportunity but soon learns that all is not well with his relatives' marriage. Waylan has in fact moved into his machine shop, where he is having an affair with his secretary, Sharon. While the specific reasons for the separation are foggy, the reasons that Waylan and Vicky got married are a complete mystery (Vicky, who reads Nabokov, defends the Rosenbergs and campaigns for Adlai Stevenson, complains with evident justice that Waylan would like to keep her "barefoot and in the kitchen"). To his credit, Jimbo falls for what appears to be a younger version of Vicky, 20-year-old college student Trudy, Sharon's cousin, who has come to New Mexico to wait tables at the local restaurant but reads Kerouac and dreams of becoming a novelist. In the meantime, she teaches Jimbo about bebop and the terrors of abortions. All of which would hold greater interest if Smith (Hunter's Trap) had created men a little worthier of these progressive women. Instead, the mismatch overwhelms a novel that views the grim side of the Eisenhower years from an intriguing perspective.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Sixteen-year-old Jimbo Proctor spends the summer of 1956 learning about life. Having accepted his uncle Waylon's offer to work in the oil fields of New Mexico, he becomes enmeshed in Waylon's marital troubles as the confidant of both his aunt Vicky and Waylon's mistress, Sharon; Jimbo himself falls in love with Sharon's cousin Trudy. While Trudy introduces him to bebop jazz and Jack Kerouac, Aunt Vicky enlightens him on the political issues of the time, and they end up being arrested for protesting the banning of a book from the local library. Smith (Hunter's Trap, LJ 9/15/96) leads us through Jimbo's education by and about women. The Fifties precursors of Sixties protest (such as Rosa Parks's refusal to take a back seat in a bus) become a backdrop to Jimbo's coming of age, which culminates in Jimbo's final statement: a defense of free speech at a school program. Recommended for public libraries.?Joshua Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. System, Poughkeepsie, NY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The double meaning of the title unfolds in a novel of remarkable sweetness about the year James (aka Jimbo) turns 16. It's 1956, and his Dallas parents let him spend the summer in New Mexico, working oil rigs with his uncle Waylan. Waylan is a boy's dream: a profane, hard-drinking hombre with too many women in his life and in his head. His current wife, James' aunt Vicky, is a smart, sassy schoolteacher who has thrown Waylan out for messing with (and hiring) an old girlfriend named Sharon, who comes with her cousin Trudy, a college woman who reads Kerouac and enchants Jimbo. What's inside Jimbo's head makes for compulsive and delicious reading. He watches his uncle and his fellow workers for clues as to what makes a man, and he obsesses, with extraordinary innocence, over all the different women in this story and their relationship to him and to his uncle. Sweat and drink, smoking and cussing, sex talk and sex dreams and sex stories--all that boy stuff is articulated beautifully, as is Jimbo's growing sense of women as actual people. More than that, the intoxication of first lust is beautifully rendered, and it is hard not to be touched by Jimbo's lush delineation of Trudy's body, as where he compares her female parts to rose petals. A subplot that involves Aunt Trudy's protests against book banning carries through to an oddly tacked-on coda, where we rush forward to the present without quite learning what James has become. Wonderful reading. GraceAnne A. DeCandido

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Chapter Fifteen: Soon as we set foot inside, I started babbling. "Hey, listen, Trudy, there's a deck of cards in my bag, or maybe we could read your book, you wanna do that? I've got a pad and a pencil, too, we could play tic-tac-toe. Or if you want to sleep, I could go to the bowling alley. I don't want you to feel uncomfort . . . ."

"Will you relax?" Trudy laughed. "I'm not going to rape you. Open me a Coke, please."

While I pried off the caps with my knife, she went into the bathroom. She came out a moment later carrying the huge, billowy slip and stood it upright at the end of a bed. It looked like a squat Christmas tree in white.

"Can't stand those things!"

I handed a bottle to her. She said thanks and took a long slug of the cola. I realized that she didn't blame me for these arrangements. She shoved a pillow up against one iron headboard, then sat back against it with her legs stretched out on the red blanket. I opened the other bottle. I hesitated, then I gestured to the foot of the bed she'd chosen.

"You mind if I sit here?"

"Course not."

I sat cross-legged, facing her. She was silent, and I felt duty-bound to entertain her.

"What's in your locket?"

She set her Coke bottle on the night stand. Her chin dropped to her breastbone; she looked down, pinched the locket gently between her thumb and index finger and peered at it cross-eyed.

"It was my grandmother's. My mother sent it for my birthday. She's been keeping it for me." She pried it open.

"Wanna see?"

She leaned over her knees and I rose up on mine and crawled forward to see the locket. Our hair caught, and I could smell her cologne and winey breath. Nervous, I took a quick look - a face with old-timey sideburns and mustache.

"It's my grandfather as a young man."

I dropped back to my Indian-sit; Trudy drew her knees up and sat with her chin on the peak they made, pulled her skirt down around her shins, forming a tent-hollow under there for me to imagine.

"I've always thought heart lockets were very romantic."

"They're neat," I said.

Her smile let me know I amused her.

"Why'd you ask me about it?"

"I dunno. Making conversation."

"You weren't thinking a boy had given it to me? Did you think there was a hank of his hair in it?"

"Uh, no." I shrugged helplessly.

"What? You don't think I could have a guy?"

This smile said she was enjoying my discomfort.

"Do you?"

"What do you think?"

"Uh, well, I think you could have any guy you set out to get, Trudy."

She smirked. "You've been around your uncle too long, Jimbo!"

"I meant it."

"That's what he'd say."

"It's true."

"Why should I be able to get any guy I want?"

"You're, well, pretty and nice . . . ."

"Sugar and spice? Oh for God's sake, can't you be any more personal than that?"

I inhaled, summoned my courage. "You have really...really beautiful breasts. And hair and eyes, too." I considered stopping there but tossed in, "And skin. I like freckles. A lot."

She was quiet a moment. That may have been the first time I'd ever surprised her. "That's a little better. How about my personality, do I have a cute personality?"

Since candor pleased her, I said, "No, not at all. That's the very last word I'd use to describe your personality."

"What, then?"

"Loud."

"I'm loud?"

"Your personality is."

She chuckled. "Does that bother you?"

"Bother me? No, not exactly. It's just I'm not quite used to it."

"What're you used to, types like Sharon?"

I wanted to say I wasn't used to any kind of girl, but I thought of Louise Bowen. And realized I'd outgrown her.

"What 'type' do you think Sharon is, anyway?" I asked.

"Geisha. A girl who curtsies and does whatever her man wants, little squeaking mouse."

She sounded angry. This characterization didn't fit my picture of Sharon. I thought of Sharon as sexy, mysterious, a little prickly and unpredictable-maybe "unknowable" to me. She'd always been "nice," but her courtesy conveyed clear boundaries, and she never bowed or scraped when it came to me. I thought she could get pretty much what she wanted when she wanted it. Otherwise, Uncle Waylan would have said adios long before now.

"You really think that's how Sharon is?"

"Most of the time. When she's not a slut."

"God, Trudy! She's your own cousin! I can't believe you're saying that about her! I thought y'all were friends."

"We were. I used to respect her and really look up to her. She was always like a big sister to me, and all my life I wanted to be just like her."

"Really?"

Trudy nodded. All her playfulness had vanished. "I used to think that life was sort of against her. I used to feel sorry for her because I thought her luck was bad, what with Aunt Norma dying of cancer and Uncle Richard being such a worthless bastard. I used to feel sorry for her because she was a victim of circumstance. I don't see it that way any more. Now I think she acts like any other stupid slut."

"What made you change your mind?"

Her look burned me. "What do you think?" I blushed, guilty by association. "You don't think she and Uncle Waylan should be together now?"

"No. He's married. Do you?"

"I guess not. No, you're right. And my Aunt Vicky, she's really super, you know. I think you'd like her. I feel sorry for her, too."

Edition details

• Publisher: TCU Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0875651895
• ISBN 13: 9780875651897
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 344