Call and Response

The author interweaves the story of widower Nestor Tudor's unrequited love for Mary Alice Celestine Lefler with parallel stories of a wide variety of other equally peculiar courtships

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.

When Miss Mary Alice Celestine Lefler steps off the Greyhound from Berkeley Springs at the shankend of August and debuts more than your average share of comely features and enticements at the elevated buffet in the Number 2 shelter up by the reservoir, where Mrs. Phillip J. King is serving poached kidneys bearnaise in celebration of getting her consciousness raised by Dr. Dewey Lunt, Miss Mary Alice Celestine Lefler just purely captivates the imagination of Mr. Dick Atwater and most especially of Nestor Tudor whose daddy Nestor Tudor got knocked out by the stripper's walnut back in Chapter 1. Pearson's tortuous digressions and convoluted prose were hilarious in A Short History of a Small Place. In his fourth Neely novel, they have become wearisome. Buy only for devoted Pearson fans.
- Maurice Taylor, Brunswick Cty. Lib., Southport, N.C.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.