Edisto: A Novel - Softcover

Powell, Padgett

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1936787725 ISBN 13: 9781936787722

Publisher: Catapult, 2017

Synopsis

Padgett Powell’s National Book Award-nominated first novel (1984) about coming of age on Edisto, an undeveloped strip of coast between Savannah and Charleston, is "a startling book, full of new sights, sounds, and ways of feeling. . . .The book is subtle, daring, and brilliant" (Donald Barthelme).

Padgett Powell’s first novel (1984) is about coming of age on Edisto, an undeveloped strip of coast between Savannah and Charleston, a “named but never discovered place in the South.”

Simons Manigault (“You say it ‘Simmons.’ I’m a rare one-m Simons”) lives with his mother, an eccentric professor known locally as the Duchess, who is convinced her twelve-year-old son can become a writer of genius. She has immersed Simons in the literary classics since birth and has given him free rein to gather material in such spots as a nightclub called Marvin’s R.O. Sweet Shop and Baby Grand.

At the center of Simons’s life on Edisto is an enigmatic character who tutors the boy in the art of watching the world without presumption. “Taurus,” as he is dubbed by Simons, acts as a father surrogate as well, taking his precocious young charge in stride. He leads him to, among other discoveries, his first prizefight, date, and hangover.

The way Simons sees the world will change radically when he leaves his ad-lib life among the denizens of Edisto for the private schools and tennis tournaments of Hilton Head, South Carolina―the territory of his father, “The Progenitor.” Using the combination of a child’s run-on phrasing and the vigorous prose and deft comic touches of a writer who is sure of every step, Padgett Powell established himself as a vivid new American writer.

About this title

About the Author

Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including The Interrogative Mood and Edisto, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and three collections of stories. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker , Harper’s , and The Paris Review , as well as in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Sports Writing . He has received a Whiting Award, the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Powell lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Foreword by Roy Blount Jr.
I love this book so much more than I do my stabs, so far, at introducing it, that I am tempted just to quote great chunks of the text, like the bit below. The narrator, after several provocative but inconclusive stabs of his own (brace yourself, in his shoes, for a bit of lore involving mayonnaise), reflects upon how he figures he will have to pick up, eventually, whatever he will need to know about sex:

. . . you can wait to know something like waiting for a dream to surface in the morning, which if you jump up and wonder hard you will never remember, but if you just lie there and listen to the suck-pump chop of the surf and the peppering and the palm thrashing and feel the rising glare of Atlantic heat, you can remember all the things of the night. But if you go around beating the world with questions like a reporter or federal oral history junior sociologist number-two pencil electronic keyout asshole, all the answers will go back into mystery like fiddlers into pluff mud.

The peppering is sand being blown against the house, the fiddlers are little crabs that skitter around on the beach. You can imagine pluff mud by the sound of the word. It just hit me, just now, how much all those sound effects, together with the rising glare of heat, are all anybody needs to know, or anyway sense, about sex.
Edisto is rich in sonic value, not only in the characters’ speech (three disparate examples):

“Say whah?” Very high.
. . .

“What choo worrit about?”
. . .

“Sock, balloon,” he said, in that kind of Jewish resigning whine they do on TV.

But also in how the narrative moves, how visual effects are almost sound effects and vice versa, as in this quick sketch of an air conditioner’s demise:

The first season, the first hint of a hurricane . . . that was it for the Carrier. Gihhhjjjjj POW―magnesium flares, house trying to hop up and run away on its stilts, transformer blown off the pole by the hard road (you could hear it), and no power for three days anywhere out here.

It will take you a while to get your bearings in Edisto, and that is appropriate, since the narrator, Simons Manigault, twelve years old, is trying to get his bearings. “I seemed to be snapping-to about one or two months late. I was a reader turning pages written some time ago, discovering what happened next.” This is a book about the reading and the writing of itself, but in a good way, a droll sort of way that is so organic you don’t have to think about it except, as I mentioned, it might help you get a grip on the issue of its bearings. It’s a book about growing up and living on a dying strip of America and about race relations and family relations. And Simons (pronounced Simmons) is a deeply likeable and reliable, extraordinarily non-emo, teller of his tale. His parents are estranged, alcoholic, promiscuous, and by no means conventionally nurturing; but he appreciates them. With reason, which he has the wits to realize. And he has the poise to hang, credibly, in an old-school African American dive.
If I were willing to drag you even more deeply into discourse less interesting than Edisto itself, I would go on at some length about other kids who serve as narrative foci of distinguished fiction: Holden Caulfield, who is mannered; David Copperfield, who is flat; and Maisie of What Maisie Knew, who is surely unlike any actual child even including Henry James himself when he was one, assuming he was. In his preface to that creepy (but in a good way) novella, James says a lot about freshness. Our boy Simons is fresh, and so is this book.
If I haven't mentioned Padgett Powell yet, I do so now belatedly. He is the author. He has been justly acclaimed. This first book of his was a great success (great as in oh yeah, not great as in some condescending heavy-handed unreadable unwittingly white-centric blockbuster such as The Help, to which it otherwise might invite comparison) when it first came out thirty-three years ago. As a writer I was envious of Edisto then and am envious of it now. As just myself the reader, I love going back over it, picking up on highlights anew. The foot in the sweet potato. The not-just-period aptness, passim, of the word Negro. The elephant and monkey joke, goes by you if you blink. Renditions like thuther and roundbunction. The mullet-fishing set-piece, oh my God. Hemingway did fishing, yes. Melville did fishing, no doubt. And mullet has not gone entirely unheralded elsewhere in American letters. But no one, to my knowledge, has done mullet fishing―by hook and worms―like Powell. It’s not the fish, not just the fish, it’s the people, and their ways.
This is the funniest damn book, and so adroit (“the Boy Act,” is it?), and so serious, so full of unforced heart.

―Roy Blount Jr.

Edition details

• Publisher: Catapult
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1936787725
• ISBN 13: 9781936787722
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 200