Call and Response

Meandering from comic set pieces to hilarious digressions, Call and Response perfectly captures the peculiar lilts and rhythms of the South -- and spins a magical tale of love and all its manifold complications. The novel centers on Nestor Tudor, a middle-aged widower who is overfond of Ancient Age and Old Gold filters. TR Pearson interweaves the story of Nestor's late-blooming, and ultimately unrequited, affection for Mary Alice Celestine Lefler with parallel stories of true love and broken hearts, young love and cheating hearts, and every other variety of courtship imaginable. Extravagantly funny and overflowing with the rich cadences and droll loquacity of Southern storytelling, Call and Response is a remarkable joy to read.

As in his previous works ( A Short History of A Small Place , etc.) Pearson's latest Southern comic novel finds its form in digression: there is a story, albeit a slender one, but the book's real substance lies in its anecdotes, detours and wrong turns. Among the characters whose lives illustrate the perils of falling--and staying--in love, are middle-aged Nestor Tudor, who conceives a hopeless passion for Mary Alice Celestine Lefler; Mr. Phillip J. King, who endures with stoic patience the distemper of his wife, trapped in a seemingly permanent state of cantankerous menopause; and dozens of peripheral characters who pursue personal obsessions and humdrum tasks, all with an edge of whimsy and a redemptive hope of romance.. Many episodes, notably the opening chapter about a visit to an itinerant strip show, are constructed with narrative vigor. But Pearson's writing, in sentences that run out of breath but keep going, accumulating details as they hurtle on, is arch and strenuous, and his deliberately tangled syntax may try the reader's patience.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.