Word: aubrey
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...addition, Aubrey Hasner, public-relationsdirector for the registry, said the license plateis under investigation and that the agency cannotrelease information on the car's ownership...
Eventually, Nathan finds out that as a teenager his mother was in love with Aubrey; in fact he paid court to all three girls. Nathan first becomes aware of him, though, during a train trip carrying the body of Nathan's grandfather, a U.S. Senator, from Washington to Knoxville. Aubrey was not welcome aboard, and the Tucker sisters, now young matrons, are particularly appalled by his efforts to join the funeral party. The journey is one of Taylor's best comic set pieces, a deadpan account of how the drunken antics of the male mourners caused a series of unseemly...
After that, Aubrey simply disappears, though Nathan believes he sometimes sees him, usually at funerals. The rest of In the Tennessee Country follows Nathan's adult life. Though Trudie wanted him to become an artist, he settles for being an art historian, and Taylor makes an elegant sketch of the bramble of academic politics. On his retirement, Nathan becomes preoccupied with Aubrey to the degree that his son Brax, who really is a painter, becomes bored and annoyed. It is Brax who finds Aubrey, now a dying ancient, and Brax who chooses finally to follow his path and live...
...admire Taylor for the sublime tact of his writing; no one's behavior, however bizarre, causes a ripple in Nathan's gentle but exacting account. The problem lies with Aubrey. He repudiates the Tuckers and the hypocrisy that kept him a true outsider. "Compromise," he intones. "That's their rule of life." And he blames Nathan for being "part of the world he was born into...
Taylor seems to agree, but the evidence elsewhere is that Nathan lacked the talent to be an artist and that he has dealt honestly with his own work and his family. And it is disappointing not to learn what Aubrey did all those years during his disappearance except gnaw at old wounds. It seems a vague, washy ending for a work that glories in the charm of specificity...