Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture: A Novel - Hardcover

Perdue, Tito

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1880909243 ISBN 13: 9781880909249

Publisher: Baskerville Pub, 1994

Synopsis

In volcanically active, post Civil War Alabama, a young man leaves his demented father's compound and seeks a job and a mate among fellow Alabamns who consider him genetically suspect.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

In the same comic vein mined in Lee (1991), Perdue starts spewing irony in the title and lets it flow thickly throughout this fictional biography of a simple man. Ben is one of the many sons of Vernon, an odd man who lives in the country and serves as a source of amusement to others. Ben's simple thoughts always express some deeper meaning. In 1883 he crosses the street for the first time and heads out to visit a neighboring farm: `` `And just how many farms might there not be,' he wondered.'' When he begins school at a late age, Ben is impressed that ``one of the students was already so advanced that she had known to bring her own ink.'' On his first visit to town, leading a goat on a string, he is dizzied by the number of people. Soon he finds employment in a dry goods store, work that satisfies his urge to organize and arrange systems. Eventually he becomes a spelling teacher and marries. Ben and his wife have children; he acquires and loses some land, and he takes a civil service exam, which he considers a very serious matter: `` `I brung my knife,' said Ben....`But I just plan to use it on the pencils, that's all.' '' He is rewarded with a job as a mail carrier. This is not a gripping, fast-moving book. Ben trudges along, making amusing observations and bumbling through. His unknowing commentary generally delivers enough laughs to compensate for the slow-and- steady pace, but occasionally the text is plodding. Without a trace of smugness, Perdue has managed to create a man with few opinions, indeed with almost no interior life. That is no mean feat, although at times it feels like a party trick. A sophisticated but less than compelling look at a dry-as-dust existence. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

The cynicism and drastic rejection of the modern that pervaded Perdue's Lee and The New Austerities are less evident in this lyrical but ironic novel, a haunting portrait of an Alabama farmer that begins in the 1870s and ends with his dying moments in 1936. Ben, the protagonist (and grandfather of the title hero of Lee), leaves his half-demented widower father, clerks in a dry goods store, keeps a hive of bees, works as a spelling teacher, goes whoring and then stumbles into marriage with a Betty, a land-rich woman. As a farmer struggling to feed six children, Ben takes a second job as a mailman, coping with robbers, drought, floods and debt, as well as with his independent-minded wife. In a strong, expressive, oddly musical style, Perdue magically evokes an Alabama of still smoldering volcanoes, red clay, windmills and ramshackle towns where horse-drawn buggies mingle with automobiles. Ben, whose gumption and misguided cleverness land him into misadventures, seems a Forrest Gump-like innocent at the novel's outset, but Perdue wryly charts his protagonist's growing maturity and breadth of vision.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Baskerville Pub
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1880909243
• ISBN 13: 9781880909249
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 222