Cain’s Version

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AUG 11, 2008

In his complex, mystical debut novel, Frank Durham concocts a post-Edenic yarn set in a small laid-back town in central Louisiana. Lindy Caton, 42, divorces her itinerant preacher husband who slept with men and gets herself involved with three "half-crazy" old ladies in Acheron Seelah, Adhah and Uhwa raising a truck garden. The old ladies tell vivid Bible stories, while Lindy mulls over the fate of her mother, "Sunshine" Caton, who took off with a neighbor years before. Turns out the eldest old woman, Uhwa, is actually the biblical Eve who arrived with her sisters after an epic flood to live in modern Acheron. The sisters were rescued from the deluge by Cain, who has wandered the earth yearning to make peace with his mother over slaying his brother, Abel. Durham draws parallels between Sunshine's reckless flight to Wyoming and Cain's roving that help to inform Lindy's quest to understand the past. Cain's sections, however (particularly his overwrought quest for his mother's pardon), are told in a stilted prose that slows the story's pace and compromises its accessibility in an otherwise inventive first novel.