Wingtips: Stories by Avery Chenoweth (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction) - Hardcover

Chenoweth MFA, Mr. Avery

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801860237 ISBN 13: 9780801860232

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Each of the tales in Wingtips, the first collection of short stories by bright new talent Avery Chenoweth, focuses on members of the Goodpasture family and their search for love, a sense of belonging, and, ultimately, spiritual transformation. From the rarified atmosphere of Martha's Vineyard and the near-tropical lushness of the Tennessee mountains to the streets of Washington, D.C., the debutante balls of Jacksonville, and the stark emptiness of Oklahoma, Chenoweth chronicles the dreams and ambitions of characters fumbling their way toward the responsibilities of maturity.

Chenoweth has created a colorful cast of characters from across the social and geographic spectrum: Yankee blue bloods summering at the Vineyard, a faith healer who lays hands on fast food restaurants as well as people, a man willing to sacrifice his children's inheritance so that Jesus will lead them to oil, a young adult who discovers his true love only to learn that she is his half-sister, a boy whose game of espionage puts an end to his innocence, and a man who pretends to be his own double at a college reunion. These stories also skirt the fantastic, with scenes of a child hiding in a grave, people attacking their guest at the dinner table, and a party of ghosts arriving for lunch. Comic and yet poignant, Wingtips explores the human heart in conflict with itself.

About this title

About the Author

Avery Chenoweth is a freelance journalist living in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Programs. This is his first book.

From the Back Cover

"Avery Chenoweth's series of related stories is absolutely wonderful: the dovetailing and the details are as inventive as they are intense. The writing gives you the impression that you are there, and you will find it difficult not to feel implicated in the egotistical struggles and awkward, sometimes amusing spectacles of family life. This is a real writer, and Wingtips is a very impressive book." -- Ann Beattie

"A fine first collection: animated, intelligent, empathic, perceptive about frailties and lunacies and dreams of human beings, as well as being touching and often hilariously funny. There's a wide variety of stories, locations, and characters here, and Mr. Chenoweth handles them all with accuracy and wit. If there's one gift a writer has, I feel, it's the ear, and this young writer has it in abundance. This book represents what a debut should be: something promising, accomplished, and new." -- Stephen Dixon

The nine gracefully interrelated stories of Avery Chenoweth's Wingtips tell us more than many novels do. This is a richly diverse accounting of the Goodpasture family, and they are as lively and interesting cast of characters as you're likely to encounter anywhere. Chenoweth has a superb sense of place, at once authentic and precise, and of the details of our troubled times. Above all, his stories are good-humored witty, satirical, sometimes slapstick funny, and never self important. This collection marks the arrival of an author worthy of our best attention." -- George Garrett

"This book is like The Last Days of Disco played out through a family chronicle. Behind each handsome face there is a jostling of wit and embarrassment, an anxious twining of contempt and envy, and a fluttering toward the light of a better life. This collection of linked stories is worthily in the tradition of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise." -- John Casey

Reviews

With earnest lyricism and emotional accuracy, the nine linked stories of Chenoweth's debut collection graph the evolution of the Goodpasture family. The dramatis personae introduced by the opening story recur: the outcast, troublemaking Stuart; his brittle mother, Carol, shattered when her husband deserts her for another woman; the virile bully, Uncle Jack; and Granelle, the doddering grandmother. From the chrysalis of "Powerman," which takes place in 1968 at the annual family retreat in muggy, graveyard-rich Beersheba Springs, Tenn., emerges a chain of events that ends when the near-30-year-old Stuart decides that "Here was where [he] would begin." The tales' geographical range?Martha's Vineyard, Jacksonville, Princeton, and Washington, D.C.?operates as a metaphor for the scope of the characters' emotional trials. Shocking revelations about divorce, paternity, sex and family form the substratum of Stuart's coming of age, while glimpses into the lives of his siblings, Jay and Brian, round out the family's difficult relationships. While these strung-together short stories sometimes feel like an undernourished novel, the intensity of the language and the grace of the narrative arc should earn this new writer praise.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A debut collection of linked stories that provides a comprehensive history of a troubled American family. The Goodpastures are the sort of people often thought to be rich just because theyve been around. Old-style Wasps, theyre actually quite modest in tastes and means. But theres a fissure of unhappiness running through the family, and a trust fund is needed to break it open: when a shady Florida lawyer swindles them, Stuart Goodpasture goes down to Jacksonville to investigateand falls in love with Muriel, a born-again Christian. She converts Stuart, who then divorces his wife, marries her, and patches together an elaborate scheme to invest the remainder of his childrens money in a new hospital wing at Oral Roberts University. His childrenStuart, Jr., Brian, Jay, and Moriahfeel betrayed, both by the divorce and the conversion, but they go along with the plan. Brian, Jay, and Moriah, all D.C. lawyers and lobbyists, are anyhow too wrapped up in their own dramas to explore their fathers. But Stuart, Jr., goes out to Oklahoma to do some ferretingand finds that the odd hospital scheme is actually an even odder oil venture. Then hes presented with evidence that makes him question his own paternity. Blood is thicker than water, perhaps, yet waters thicker than air: its hard enough to stay loyal to your old man when your entire family hates him, hes squandered your inheritance, and his second wife keeps praying for you in restaurants. But what if hes not even your old man? Thats when you begin to wonder what family life is all about. Nicely drawn portraits that ring true, enclosed within a narrative thats at times badly overwritten (I was a humble cottage villager who carried in his rucksack daydreams of effortless and precocious success, and I was still trying then to make that quantum leap onto the staff of a senator). Still, a good start. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This wonderfully sardonic and incisive novel in nine short stories explores the dysfunctional Goodpasture family: Stuart Sr. and Carol, and their children Moriah, Stuart Jr., Brian, and Jay, plus assorted grandparents, aunts and uncles. It is clear from the beginning that Stuart Sr. and Carol's marriage is crumbling; in later stories we read of their divorce and the effect this has had on the others, particularly Stuart Jr., who, after college graduation, spends a summer on Martha's Vineyard followed by a number of years in New York trying to make it as an actor. When he returns for his tenth college reunion, he discovers that his charm can no longer carry him to the places he expected it would. In a later story, he doubts his own paternity when his mother's past secrets are dubiously exposed. Other stories reveal his mother's fanciful past and his siblings' attempts to build their own lives and their disillusionment with their estranged father, whose new, born-again life keeps them all on edge. Frank Caso

Edition details

• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801860237
• ISBN 13: 9780801860232
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 168