From Publishers Weekly:
Billy Crew, the narrator of this sprawling tale of the deep South, almost cracks up when his girlfriend Hazel Rance marries his buddy, lumberjack Frank Jackson. Instead, Billy flees Georgia and becomes a New York painter. Years later, after ditching his fashionable wife and career, he goes back to the trailer camp to confront Hazel and win her love. But he finds Frank berserk with grief and guilt over the death of his hard-drinking brother Jake, whom he may have smothered. As Frank, Hazel and Billy drive around with Jake's deteriorating corpse in a metal coffin, they have sundry escapades including a messy menage a trois and an encounter with a Creek Indian preacher-woman. Told in a series of long, digressive flashbacks that slow the narrative, this novel is, at its best, a haunting, incantatory meditation on sin and salvation, loss, love and the need to go on. Smith, extending the territory explored in his first novel, Canaan , gives us in Billy Crew a seeker who returns home only to discover that he went back to say goodbye. First serial to Harper's and Paris Review.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal:
In Smith's powerful new novel Billy Crew returns to his south Georgia home after a seven-year exile. He renews his friendship with Frank Jackson and Frank's wife, Hazel, whom Billy has loved for most of his life. With the decaying corpse of Frank's brother Jake in tow, the three embark on a bizarre burial journey that leads them to reflect on their pasts and brings about a future none of them could have envisioned. The familiar trappings of modern Southern literature are in abundance here: ornate Faulknerian prose, trailer parks and pentecostal preachers, lyrical eroticism, and incantatory meditations on the past. Yet Smith transcends the familiar with stylistic brilliance and a palpable energy all too rare in a contemporary fiction dominated by anemic minimalism. Very impressive.Laurence Hull, Cannon Memorial Lib., Concord, N.C.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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