| Modern Baptists, Wilcox's debut, was a funny, endearingly odd book. This second novel is all that and more: a character-comedy with total credibility, canny pacing, perfect narrative poise--and nonstop laughs. Ethyl Mae Coco, in her late 50s, is the cellist of the Pro Arts Quartet, a semi-professional string ensemble based in the Mississippi-border town of Tula Springs, Louisiana. Her fat son, George Henry, a teacher and part-time computer repairman (one of six grown Coco children), is the first-violinist, off and on--since he frequently quits in a rage over his mother's coolness to his engagement to a hot-tub saleswoman named Heidi. (Mrs. Coco ""had always hoped for gifted children, slightly disabled by artistic genius that she would nourish and protect."") The violist is Myrtice Fitt: perenially hospitalized, bored, a secretive trouble-maker. The second violin belongs to Duk-Soo Yoon, a 47-year-old graduate student at St. Jude's State College--who lives in the dorms, collects vintage films, works away at a dissertation (on the philosophical implications of tourism). . . and pines for Mrs. Coco. And the quartet plays at such functions as the annual Red Fish Rodeo, at grand openings of the local BurgerMat, and for the disturbed children at the state hospital. (""Huddled beneath an oak in the asphalt-covered playground, Myrtice, George Henry, and Duk-Soo, who had unfolded a rainhat to protect his hair, watched warily as a burly girl laid into a tire swing with a spatula. 'Bad, bad, bad!' the unfortunate girl screamed as Mrs. Coco gazed down on the scene from the second floor of the plantation house where the hospital administrators had their offices."") Wilcox's characters, then, are a brilliant blend of the typical and the wildly eccentric. With extravagant yet finely tuned dialogue, they form the center of a memorable portrait of small-town, low-rent culture. And they're carried exuberantly along by the varied elements of a life-sized yet grandly turbulent plot: Duk-Soo's guardianship of a mentally ill boy; the murder of a chihuahua; a vigilante committee; the long-ago abortion of one of Mrs. Coco's daughters; and Mrs. Coco's earnest conversion to Catholicism. As Wilcox jumps from absurdity to absurdity, however, it also become clear that this is one comic novel with a genuine theme: the gentle terrors of placelessness, the difficulties of feeling or being at home--even in the tiniest of towns. In sum: a striking, priceless work of comic fiction--especially welcome in a spring season that brings an unusually large number of failed farces, some of them by eminent funnymen (Thomas Berger, Peter DeVries, Bruce Jay Friedman). Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission. |
