Where Somebody Waits
Her statuesque figure topped by a towering crown of flaming red hair, Ruby bears a striking resemblance to America’s reigning comic queen of the 1950s.  Equally zany and as headstrong as the beloved Lucille Ball, Ruby might be more than her backwoods Arkansas town can handle.  When she marries the older, shorter Bubba Davidson, the town’s Jewish haberdasher, no one believes it’s for love, especially with Ruby’s heartthrob, John Clay, stationed in Korea.  But love him she does, through decades of a childless marriage in which they dote on nieces and nephews in lieu of the family they never have.  Their love even survives John Clay’s return from the battlefield, a reunion whose passion is rekindled in back seats and hotel rooms until Ruby finds the strength to commit to Bubba and turn her back on John Clay, seemingly forever.  In the madcap, outspoken, yet hauntingly vulnerable Ruby, Kaufman has created an indelible character, one whose full life arc is succinctly yet voluptuously rendered through the incandescent vignettes of Kaufman’s masterful first novel-in-stories. --Carol Haggas