A Woman Named Drown: A Novel - Softcover

Powell, Padgett

Softcover

ISBN 10: 148046421X ISBN 13: 9781480464216

Publisher: Open Road Media, 2014

Synopsis

Hailed by Time as an “extravagantly comic” novel, A Woman Named Drown is a wild and strange journey through America’s South that follows a young PhD dropout who falls in with an amateur actress–cum-pool shark
On the brink of earning his doctorate in chemistry, the unnamed narrator decides to chuck it all away in favor of real life. So begins an odd pilgrimage through the American South. In Tennessee, our hero is bewitched by an older, gin-swilling, pool-playing sometimes-actress who claims to have recently starred in a theatrical production about a “woman named Drown.” He moves in with her and just as quickly begins encountering her strange compatriots. Before he knows it, they’re heading farther south together—to Florida—where the data that the dropout scientist is collecting from life’s laboratory is about to get quite contradictory.
Richly influenced by offbeat literary giant Donald Barthelme, Padgett Powell’s A Woman Named Drown offers readers a smorgasbord of literary strangeness—a surreal series of adventures in which nothing much—and yet everything—happens at once.  

About this title

About the Author:

Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including The Interrogative Mood, You & Me, and Edisto, a finalist for the National Book Award; and three story collections. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Little Star, and the Paris Review, and he is the recipient of the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Whiting Writers’ Award and the James Tait Black Prize in fiction, the UK’s oldest literary award.

From Publishers Weekly:

Critics and readers lauded Edisto, Powell's first novel, for its originality and witty, mannered prose. His second book does not live up to expectations. The slim tale, narrated by a young man who abandons his doctorate program in chemistry to amass instead "lab notes of life," consists of a series of picaresque encounters with characters often identified only by labels (e.g., "the Veteran", "the Orphan"), none of whom is appealing and all of whom are eccentric to the point of grotesquery. The idiosyncracies of style that were endearing in Edisto are labored here to excess, and the book's campy tone becomes irritating early on. While Powell's ear for Southern speech is impeccable, the dialogue goes nowhere, and the narration is bogged down in murky philosophizing about life as a series of scientific chain reactions or as theater of the absurd. The narrator explains his reaction-series theory of existence in pseudoscientific language that slows an already nearly inert story. While he eventually comes to a somewhat hopeful conclusion about his future, the reader has long since ceased to care.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 148046421X
• ISBN 13: 9781480464216
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 178