The Reviews are Coming In…

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a plot for pridemore, fiction, forewordreviews.com, reviews, Stephen Roth, trina carter

Here’s a very nice review of A Plot for Pridemore by Trina Carter of ForewardReviews.com:

Exaggeration brings humor to the publicity stunt this mayoral main character has in store.

Machiavelli would have admired Monroe Tolliver. He isn’t a prince, just a mayor, but he has a plan to save his town. The fact that it involves explosives, kickbacks, and trickery is all part of the plot to get Pridemore, Missouri, going again. For if there’s one thing Tolliver has learned in his nearly fifty-year span as mayor, it’s that real goodness can be a liability, but the pretense is always very effective.

Set in America’s heartland, A Plot for Pridemore is a send-up of small-town politics. Pridemore is in danger of dying out. The new bypass has funneled traffic away from what was once a prosperous place for tourists vacationing in the Ozarks. The mayor seizes on the fact that Lewis and Clark passed close enough that way to turn a natural bridge and network of caves into a roadside attraction. Like Br’er Fox constructing a doll out of a lump of tar, the mayor dresses up his plan with enough made-for-television sensationalism to lure the media to Pridemore to cover the rescue of a slow-witted kid trapped in the cave.

It’s a sticky situation all right, and Roth spins his tale with a sure hand. He uses omniscient narration to keep his plates in the air with multiple viewpoints even as the publicity stunt goes awry. He uses exaggeration to poke fun at civic pride with almost Twain-like humor, like when he calls the town hall “one of those brick monstrosities that had all the charm of an East German dormitory.” He also creates characters to root for, including a jaded young newspaper reporter fresh out of journalism school, and characters that defy easy stereotyping, such as an aged skateboarding spelunker and beer-buzzed engineering expert brought in to save the day.

Some of these same characters are never fully developed, however. For example, the reporter remains the hapless onlooker, the kid in the cave is the clueless victim, and the old mayor stays the villain masterminding the whole fiasco (though he is the most complex and interesting character). There are also a few inconsistencies regarding the high-tech era in which the story supposedly takes place—battered maps rather than GPS, bedroom phones rather than cell phones, among others.

This is the kind of novel that begs to be read.

Book Review: Modern Baptists

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confederacy of dunces, james wilcox, louisiana, modern baptists, plot for pridemore, reviews, southern fiction, Stephen Roth, tula springs

Poor Bobby Pickens. His doctor has diagnosed him with malignant cancer, his half-brother, F.X., has moved in after being been released from Angola Prison, and Bobby is in danger of losing his job as assistant manager at the Sonny Boy Bargain Store in Tula Springs, Louisiana.

If that doesn’t sound particularly funny, read on for a few pages and see why Bobby Pickens (or “Mr. Pickens” as he is usually addressed) might be the most amusing Southern anti-hero since Ignatius Reilly in Confederacy of Dunces. James Wilcox’s Modern Baptists is filled with small-town dreamers: the handsome and Hollywood-obsessed F.X., the stuck-up and leggy red-head Toinette, and the big-hearted and big-boned Burma, who is about to be married but can’t shake her longing for another man.

We see all of these characters through the very shallow lens of Mr. Pickens, a chubby, middle-aged man with a bad comb-over, several layers of self-pity, and an unfortunate talent for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. We follow him through one awkward social encounter after another. Bobby Pickens is like most of us on our worst days: unsteady, unkempt, self-conscious but yet hopelessly unaware of that piece of toilet paper sticking to the bottom of our shoe. That’s every day for Mr. Pickens, and it’s sometimes a wonder he can pick himself up from the plastic-covered love seat in his elderly mother’s house.

James Wilcox wrote Modern Baptists in the early 1980s, and many critics have hailed it as one of the finest novels you may not know about. GQ magazine’s 45th anniversary edition rated it as one of the best works of fiction in the past 45 years. It certainly must be one of the funniest. Wilcox has a dry delivery that lets you in on his characters’ flaws without being heavy-handed about it. Watching two residents of Tula Springs interact is like watching a chess match between a pair of barely sober checkers players. Each has a different agenda, and each is certain that he or she is achieving it. Yet Wilcox gives you just enough information to know that no one is winning much of anything. I haven’t laughed so hard reading a book in a long time.

Bobby Pickens suffers countless indignities. The other characters beat on him like a tetherball through most of the 239 pages. In one scene when Mr. Pickens kneels with another man to pray in a darkened bedroom, you cringe in anticipation of the embarrassment that is sure to come.

Through all the defeats, however, the main character of Modern Baptists carries on and maybe even earns a smidgeon of dignity along the way. If not a hero, he at least becomes someone you can root for. That is what makes Wilcox’s book a study in humanity as well as humor.