Word: blackstarr
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When Hero Jim Blackstarr does any talking, he is all corn pone and hominy grits: "Look, Betty Lee, it i'n't goin' to be like this all the time. It won't be too long foah we kin git married . . ." But when Jim gets around to long thoughts about the landscape, Author Salamanca puts down these words about a summer storm: "It gets gray and cool and then the wind comes gusty from the mountains . . . and the tossing trees in the wind are like oceans with little silver fish slipping through the tops...
This odd contrast of styles has a crippling effect on Salamanca's torrential first novel, which carries Jim Blackstarr from his fourth to his 17th year in and around Charlottesville, Va. The book is drunk on nature, the round of the seasons, the beauty of women. Whatever lucky Jim wants in females he gets, whether it is Neighbor Betty Lee, whose "cool firm thighs were like two great silver carp," or Cousin Nory, whose thighs, "with their milk-white, melon-firm flesh, struck his mind with ruinous astonishment." or Schoolteacher Irene, whose thighs are "like moist and mobile alabaster...
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