![]() ![]() O'Connor's treatment of the characters in this story reinforces her view of man as a fallen creature. The Misfit, the pathological killer who murders an entire family in this story, was apparently fabricated from newspaper accounts of two criminals who had terrorized the Atlanta area in the early 1950s Red Sammy Butts, according to another critic, may have been based on a local "good ole boy" who had made good and returned to Milledgeville each year, on the occasion of his birthday, to attend a banquet in his honor, hosted by the local merchants. Several critics have pointed out the influence of regional and local newspaper stories on O'Connor's fiction. These resources included the people around her, her reading material, which consisted of various books and periodicals which came to Andalusia, and an assortment of local and regional newspapers. Since she was limited by her illness to short and infrequent trips away from the farm, O'Connor learned to draw upon the resources at hand for the subject matter of her stories. ![]() The post On the Road With a Grandma Named Pincer appeared first on New York Times.First published in 1953, following her permanent move to Andalusia, her mother's dairy farm, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" illustrates many of the techniques and themes which were to characterize the typical O'Connor story. It’ll swallow you, if you’re not careful, and your Land Cruiser, too.Įrin Somers is the author of the novel “Stay Up With Hugo Best.” This is the sweet, yet cautionary note the book ends on. She seems “to be trapped in a continual reckoning between present and past.” As the caper wanes, McKenzie allows Penny a modicum of closure. Penny’s inability to get her life together traces back to her family history. Here is where McKenzie’s book differs most from Portis’s: It’s ultimately a family novel. “Though nearly five years had passed,” she reflects, “I hadn’t really been able to accept or even think about it.” Neither their remains nor their car was ever recovered, and there lingers, in Penny’s mind anyway, the possibility that their disappearance was deliberate. They had moved to Australia “because they had liked the climate and the geomorphology” and also possibly “to denounce the American Dream.” If you can bear with it through these high jinks, the heart of the book concerns Penny’s parents, who disappeared on a trip to Mount Isa in the Australian outback. Penny and her grandfather witness their rented Land Cruiser swallowed up by a sinkhole. An estranged biological father named Gaspard launches a sneak attack. Something called the Scintillator, which looks “like an undersized rocket launcher,” is seized from Pincer’s house. Irradiated bones are discovered in a woodshed. These people are unable to avoid bodily injury. Burt is admitted with a ruptured ulcer, Pincer is admitted for psychiatric evaluation, Penny is admitted for a septic stab wound in the leg, then again for a gash in the other leg. Penny has been summoned by Pincer’s accountant and close associate Burt Lampey, a large, bewigged man in his 50s, with problems of his own.īurt has a dog, a “woolly orange puffball” named Kweecoats, but the title also refers to his old, sea-green van: “He said his ex had named it in honor of a beloved novel with a similar name.” Burt and Penny make a plan to remove Pincer from her home and have it cleaned, which sets into motion a series of events involving intercontinental travel, Burt’s attractive younger brother Dale and a murder investigation.įrom Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara to Brisbane, Australia, to Tyler, Texas, the plot gallops along, leaning heavily on people going to the hospital. Her living arrangements have raised alarms with Adult Protective Services. She is in her 80s, suffers intermittent dementia, lives in a house full of rats and hoarded jars. Penny’s grandmother, known as Pincer, presents the more pressing of the two. She has just under $850 to her name, a broken marriage behind her, and has been tasked with helping to mitigate two crises related to her grandparents. ![]() Penny Rush has quit her job as a dental receptionist to travel south from Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara. “The Dog of the North,” a new novel by Elizabeth McKenzie ( “The Portable Veblen”), borrows that book’s road trip structure, canine preoccupations and antic style. The dog is also a dog (Guy Dupree’s) and it’s also, arguably, Ray. The dog of the title is the name of a bus belonging to a crooked doctor Ray encounters in Mexico. In the road novel “The Dog of the South,” Charles Portis’s feckless hero Ray Midge traces a route from Little Rock to Belize in pursuit of an acquaintance named Guy Dupree, who has stolen his car, his credit cards and his wife.
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