Word: talcott
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...found dead of a heart attack at his desk. At the height of his career Garland was up for the Supreme Court, but his bid was scuttled by rumors of underworld ties, leaving him angry and embittered--he's the Clarence Thomas who might have been. Garland's son Talcott is a moody, middle-aged law professor saddled with a flagging career and a failing marriage. Growing up in the shadow of his famous failure of a dad has made him a fizzing cocktail of racial and Oedipal rage...
...begins when Talcott realizes that his father's case isn't quite closed. At the funeral a sinister billionaire confronts him about some mysterious "arrangements" the judge made before his death, of which Talcott knows nothing. A white chess pawn--the judge was a chess fiend--is delivered by an unknown messenger. The priest who delivered Oliver's eulogy turns up dead, his body grotesquely tortured (Carter might want to tell his kids to avert their eyes at this point). As in all good mysteries, the key to the present lies in the past, and to find it, Talcott must...
John Henry Days indeed tackles a great amount of material but without any signs of overreaching or strain. The novel ripples outward from a central event: a three-day festival in Talcott, W.Va., commemorating the legendary black railroad worker who outhammered a steam drill but died in victory. Many of the ballads about John Henry place the epic battle he waged with the machine in nearby Big Bend Tunnel, and Talcott residents hope that John Henry Days will become an annual and tourist-friendly attraction...
...meantime, Sutter must endure and write up this Talcott festival for his Internet employer of the moment: "A bloodless edit will follow...and one day an electronic burp with his byline will float up into the Web morass, a little bubble of content he will never...
...early flash-forward in the novel reveals that the Talcott weekend celebrations will end in an act of violence. But this seed of suspense never really sprouts into page-turning anticipation. John Henry Days evolves in a circular, not a forward, momentum. The contemporary, confected media hype is contrasted, implicitly, throughout the book with the older, mysterious, grassroots spread of the tale of John Henry, who may have died in the early 1870s but who is as impossible to identify historically as Odysseus or Robin Hood. As one character notes, "The Ballad of John Henry has picked up freight from...