The Show-Me State - Softcover

Rees, Lloyd

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1854111450 ISBN 13: 9781854111456

Publisher: Seren Books/Poetry Wales Pr Ltd, 1900

Synopsis

When Arthur Noone arrives at South Missouri State University to research American usage of English, words almost fail to describe the fix in which he finds himself. Bored with academe and escaping a broken marriage, the weak-willed Arthur is desperate to have a good time with American beer and women.
In a fruitless wait for a new woman friend he unwittingly witnesses a gang murder of the wrong man. As the truth slowly dawns on innocent Arthur, and with the gang and the police on his trail, he turns detective to save himself from a spell in jail, or the morgue. In a story with more near misses, mistaken identities and wordplay than a Shakespeare comedy, Noone finds an all too real subject for the public lecture he is to give at the University.
Can he escape the hitmen? Can he allay the suspicions of Missouri's Finest? Will the glacial Elsa even realise he exists? Just how friendly does temporary colleague Burfon plan to get? And could a lecture on the metalanguage of English description ever be interesting? Lloyd Rees' witty and humorous novel keeps the tension on as the linguistic accidents threaten to envelop Arthur.

About this title

Reviews

British import about a wimpy English professor, Arthur Noone, on sabbatical at a regional university in Missouri. Rees seems to think the device of naming a character ``Noone'' when he is, indeed, no one, rather clever. In the same manner, his Missouri college town is named Cape Retardeau. And Rees, using Arthur, spends a lot of time opining on how stupid the locals are, although Arthur isn't very bright himself, and the locals often make fun of him. Ostensibly, Arthur has come to the States to study the idiosyncrasies of American English, but in truth he's recovering from a divorce, so he spends his time drinking, playing pool, and ogling coeds. He has two unsatisfactory tˆte-…-tˆtes and then falls for an iceberg named Elsa. Bumbling along, taken in by pool sharks and con-men, he finds himself in the middle of both a private detective's stake-out and an FBI sting operation. Then he's kidnapped, and through a wholly uncharacteristic, nearly accidental set of actions he turns the tables and becomes a local hero. In ``Cape Retardeau''? Not likely, but Rees doesn't act as though even he takes this novel seriously. Arthur's heroism fails to win Elsa, so it's on to the English Department and back to class, where Arthur's lecture to his unenthusiastic students tries to draw a linguistic lesson from his encounters with the underworld. That fizzles, too, and Arthur wanders off-stage, none the wiser. A far less accomplished version of Graham Greene's entertainments--almost a parody of them, in fact. It isn't bad when Rees keeps his tongue in his cheek, but he undercuts his poor professor so severely it's hard to care about him, and, unlike Greene's, Rees's contempt for America is neither veiled nor well-informed. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Seren Books/Poetry Wales Pr Ltd
• Publication date: 1900
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1854111450
• ISBN 13: 9781854111456
• Binding: Paperback