HOMECOMING
by Caren Gussoff
(Serpent’s Tale) $14

Homecoming is a novel about a family stingy with love and generous with
violent gestures. Katey tells the story of Reese, her oldest sister, who arrives
dead in sentence one. Caren Gussoff’s clear, direct prose travels Katey’s memory
of Reese, through a history difficult with contradiction.

Reese was the beloved oldest sister, and an addict. She was a child whose eyes grew mean watching accidents, who threatened her younger sister with a fork. Reese’s memory is a powerful presence, evoking affection and fear. Memory blurs and sweetens in retrospect; nostalgia coexists with old wounds.

Reese taught Katey lessons of silent tolerance and denial of pain. Katey replays this dynamic with their mother: “She… slaps me directly across the face…. Scald rises to my cheeks, and our mother watches me, testing me: waiting for me to reach up, hold my hands to the sting in defense, pinch out tears. Instead, I smile carefully, widen my eyes, suck in my stomach; I try to look like something she could love.” Reese has taught Katey that love demands quiet suffering, taking the insult of a mother’s slap, a boyfriend’s silence, a sister’s abuse.

Homecoming exposes the way we conceal difficult emotions with selective memory, and deny emotional receptivity by mean self- protection: “Our mother did not believe in pain, and blurred her eyes to it. If you cannot see it, cannot hear, if it is not said, it doesn’t exist. This is how you live a life.” Katey becomes distant and emotionally immune. She lives with a man whom she calls “the man I’m not sure loves me.” Katey allows herself the emotional distance to be cruel to him, leaving in the middle of the night, not telling him. This is her inheritance.

This novel is a homecoming, an adult rinsing of childhood hurts. Death creates an actual absence, something to mourn and love and get to the other side of. Katey speaks this story of hurt, and so begins to undo her difficult history. ADRIANA GRANT

MRS. HOLLINGSWORTH’S MEN
by Padgett Powell
(Houghton Mifflin) $20

Padgett Powell is what some refer to as “a writer’s writer,” an author whose
magical twisting of English coupled with his ability to procreate highly odd
and original stories make him a grand, if not confusing, American original.
From his heartfelt 1984 debut, Edisto, about a young man being trained
to become a great writer by his eccentric mother, to 1998’s Aliens of Affection,
a story collection with enough weirdo characters to make Donald Barthelme blush,
Powell does to the mystique of Southern writing what Tom Robbins did for “Northwest
writing.” That is, he’s stretched it out so far and wide as to shatter the genre’s
stoic boundaries.

Powell’s fourth novel is a wild daydream that morphs into an epic love story. It starts with Mrs. Hollingsworth, a woman haunted by war and lost love. When she sits down to write a shopping list, she digresses into an afternoon of writing that takes us through her imagination. The hero is ghostlike Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. Getting into good ol’ fashioned (and sometimes futuristic) trouble, Forrest crosses wits with dopey gangsters and criminals with names like Hod, Rape, Bundy, and Oswald. Powell’s magic is fully evident in the way his characters talk: as ridiculous as a snobby aristocrat bred with Tennessee white trash, and as funny. No one talks quite like Padgett Powell.

Although sometimes too experimental with its time-shifting and motives, Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men is a lovable 134-page historical novel turned on its head. KEVIN SAMPSELL

LOST AND FOUND

THE OFFICE–A FACILITY BASED ON CHANGE
by Robert Propst
(The Business Press, Elmhurst, IL, 1968)

At first glance, this quaint repository of photos, diagrams, and jargon wrapped
in a shiny red cover seems like many other business books that peddle their
asses by telling you what you know. Catchy graphics and gimmicky layouts snatch
the eyes of managers whose lips move to phrases tuned to the pitch of Zen poetry.
In the headings–“A place for transacting abstractions”–wild, unwritten Spoonerisms
vie with stultifying text, which provides the closure of one hand clapping:
“Resultantly, we are concerned with reality simulation.”

The reality under such masterful adverbial fire here is the office, circa 1968. The changes advocated by the subtitle mostly redo use of vertical space. There’s much advice on how partitions can lend the human animal the appropriate sense of security and sociability. We like to be left to ourselves when we work but want to be in touch with others.

What’s missing–particularly in view of the historical perspective the book provides– is one 800-pound gorilla of a subtext, the personal computer. This absence creates a narrative tension the intended readers of The Office could not have anticipated. In chapter after chapter, the latest designs advance toward an abyss of an obsolescence whose immediacy looms within the book itself. How, for instance, do they come up with the designs? “A facility planner…using computer graphics” shows the way, industriously rotating forms of displays as he wields an electric light pen and stares into the cathode-tube future. DOUG NUFER