Word: edisto
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Author Padgett Powell, 35, has weathered this ordeal nicely. To be sure, a few readers will complain that his second novel fails to live up to the promise of Edisto, which drew raves and comparisons to Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye when it appeared in 1984. A Woman Named Drown is not going to remind anyone of Anna Karenina. On the other hand, Powell's new book picks up smoothly where its predecessor left off, which is not, given the level of skills evident throughout Edisto, a bad place to begin...
Happily, all of that furious and frantic preparation, from Edisto, S.C., to Eastport, Me., turned out to be a storm before a comparative lull. After G hour had come and gone, first on the barrier islands off North Carolina and last in upper New England, all of what the newspaper people call aftermath reports had a wonderful quality about them. They all more or less said whew! To be sure, Gloria's pummeling, up-the-coastline meander left a wake of damage and sorrow. Seven deaths could be traced to the storm. At least half a million people were forced...
...EDISTO by Padgett Powell. A teen-age boy, wise beyond his years, recalls a complex adolescence on a sea island off the coast of South Carolina...
...FICTION: Edisto, Padgett Powell God's Pocket, Pete Dexter ∙ Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon Sweeney Astray, Seamus Heaney Testing the Current, William McPherson ∙ The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera...
...every turn, Powell makes Edisto far more than a novel about budding aware ness. As the boy talks he reveals the South's new reconstruction: carpetbaggers who ar rive by jet from the Middle East to buy whole islands, the latest styles in scalawags and gentrification. Simons revisits Charles ton's old Negro market and finds that things have changed: "Bats, rafters, shale, pee, lead paint, clothes wads, the stuck bar ber pole, chili in open pots, all went to dropped ceilings for energy saving, parquet, rest rooms, pastel, jean shops, international flags waving in front...