Indiana, Indiana
Impressionistic and episodic, Laird's lyrical second novel (after The Impossibly) tells the story of a simpleminded elderly Indiana man visited by visions and memories of the past. Since the death of his parents, Noah Maximilien Summers has lived alone with only a cat for company. He was once briefly married, but barely a month after his wedding in 1937, his wife, Opal, descended into madness and set fire to their house. Sixty years later, Opal has just died, and Noah dreams of her and rereads the letters she sent from the asylum where she was institutionalized. His memories of Opal and of his mother, Ruby, and sympathetic father, Virgil, a former schoolteacher, give structure to his stream-of-consciousness musings, which encompass childhood memories, dreams and present-day observations. His uncanny ability to see things a vision of a clock leads him to a buried heirloom in his father's fields makes him briefly useful to the town sheriff, but he never holds down a real job after a short stint as a mailman during World War II. Curious, wry and wise, Noah is a sympathetic protagonist, and Hunt's seamless narrative ushers readers smoothly into his consciousness. Though modest in scope and rather musty in conception (Hunt owes much to the modernists), the novel is crisp and visceral in its evocation of Noah's inner and outer landscapes, an autumnal serenade to rural America.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.