Home for the Day

The narrator returns to his small Southern hometown to attempt a reconciliation with his estranged father and to determine what to do about the remains of a lover, whose ashes he had secretly interred in the ancestral cemetery a year earlier.

Intertwined feelings of nostalgia and alienation pervade this languid meditation on a gay man's lonely childhood and his grief at the recent death, from AIDS, of his lover. In a remote family cemetery outside his rural hometown of Branch Creek, N.C., from beside the unmarked grave where, a year earlier, he buried his lover's cremains, an unnamed first-person narrator reflects on his life's ironies and on the chain of events that have just caused his father to drive him away with a shotgun. Flashbacks to his childhood and problematic home life, the discovery of his sexuality, his ultimate love affair and the horror of Pete's death set off his current dilemma: what to do now that his father knows of Pete's secret burial in the family plot. Ferrell's (Where She Was) spare, pastoral narrative successfully evokes the rural South but waxes maudlin in its treatment of Pete. Although there are several odd and compelling images among the recollections, the author often overplays his symbols, sacrificing credibility for the sake of color or some structural irony. No one in the novel is remotely likable, either; despite an engaging prose style that intimates that there are fascinating stories all around, Ferrell manages to avoid all but a few.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A slight, drifting novel full of emotion but lacking in action. A man on a mysterious mission to his family's graveyard from New York City, whose father is breathing down his neck with a shotgun, stops to tell the story of both his southern upbringing and a passionate affair with a man who has died. Ferrell (Where She Was, 1985) creates some startling images, like that of the narrator's mother striking him in the face with a hairbrush when he wishes aloud that she had married a man other than his unfaithful father. But Ferrell has a habit of using fey language and convoluted syntax. Phrases like ``By me he is loved'' and ``Why she did it is in the story of it'' just gum up the flow. A boyhood relationship with a tough guy named Johnny is convincing with its homoerotic tension, but it goes off track when the narrator and Johnny attend a fair together and Johnny jilts him. The narrator ends up in the red velvet and pink satin decorated trailer (``my ideal of real elegance'') of the man who does the elephant act and has a sexual experience described in gauzy terms (``It was red and sparkly when it happened''). There is a breathless tone here, indicating that the novel is speeding toward a strong finish--which it delivers--but often the language is so vague and affected that the true drama is hidden along the way. Also, while Ferrell does a decent job with the material, much of it (the violent southern father, the gay man as a young boy fixing his mother's hair, the fast-moving high life of the performance world) feels archetypal rather than specific. Brevity, overwrought language, and episodes with little bearing on the plot combine to give this the feeling of an excellent short story padded into a so-so novel. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

As a boy, the narrator of Ferrell's (Where She Was, LJ 10/1/85) second novel plays hairdresser and undertaker and is acutely aware that he is different from other residents of Branch Creek, North Carolina. As an adult, he returns home briefly in an attempt to reconcile his feelings for two powerful men-his dead lover and his strongly disapproving father. In typical Southern narrative fashion, this novel digresses freely, fluctuates between tragedy and comedy, and scrutinizes past sins as the foundation for present pains. Ferrell is adept at portraying adolescent anguish but somewhat less successful in depicting his adult protagonist. An exaggerated episode of grief and madness (induced by the failure of a washing machine) brings the book to a strained conclusion. Purchase where there is demand.
Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.