[This brief review of Tito Perdue’s New Austerities is reproduced for the benefit of enthusiasts and bibliomanes. By Harold Augenbraum for Library Journal, 1 May 1994. I copied the text from the Barnes and Noble website and trusted the date from encyclopedia.com.]
Perdue’s second novel focuses on the same characters as his first but is set a few years earlier. Book thief, insomniac, heavy drinker, and curmudgeon Leland (‘Lee’) Pefley is a transplanted Alabaman living in the northern reaches of Manhattan with his diminutive wife, Judy, and working in the southernmost ones as a word-processor. Despising contemporary urban life and its denizens, he spends most of his energy on reading the Greeks, listening to classical music, and drinking. At wit’s end, the couple decides to move to Lee’s ancestral home in Alabama. Their trip becomes a comic roller-coaster ride in a midnight-blue Volvo whose top speed is 40 miles an hour. They arrive down South, where Lee proceeds to make a fool of himself looking for people he knew decades before and Judy accepts everything with equanimity. Lee’s family, an odd assortment of hillbillies (although even here, one of them tinkers with a modem as the others fish in a putrid water hole) presided over by non compos mentis Lulu, immediately take him to be an IRS agent. Full of neurotic energy, kooks, eccentrics, weirdos, and intellectuals, this novel will appeal to readers whose interest is in a good laugh and general amazement at Perdue’s creations. — Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib., New York.
No comments:
Post a Comment