Understanding Women
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- 1,49 €
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- 1,49 €
Publisher Description
Named “best novel” by the Texas Institute of Letters, C.W. Smith’s Understanding Women is the hilarious and moving account of a teenage boy’s encounters in the prickly thicket of adult domestic difficulties. When James (Jimbo) Proctor gets an offer from his Uncle Waylan to spend a summer working in the oil fields as a roustabout to earn the cash for a car, he happily agrees. But when he arrives in the small New Mexico town, he finds that his uncle and aunt are living apart. He and his uncle have to bunk in the back of the uncle’s shop. Jimbo wonders if this is just a little spat or a serious breach (it keeps him from enjoying his aunt’s home cooked meals), and is it related to Uncle Waylan’s recent acquisition of a stunning young secretary named Sharon? Thinking of himself as the protagonist of what he calls The Hardy Boy and the Mystery of the Marital Estrangement, Jimbo sets out to solve the puzzle of what makes people fall in and out of love. The mystery grows exponentially deeper and more personal when Jimbo himself tumbles headlong for Sharon’s cousin, Trudy, a college girl and aspiring writer who teaches him about beatniks and bebop and the manly art of bedding a beloved. “What's inside Jimbo's head makes for compulsive and delicious reading. He watches his uncle and his fellow workers for clues as to what makes a man, and he obsesses, with extraordinary in¬nocence, over all the different women in this story and their relationship to him and to his uncle. Sweat and drink, smoking and cussing, sex talk and sex dreams and sex stories—all that boy stuff is articulated beautifully, as is Jimbo's growing sense of women as actual people….Wonderful reading. “ (Booklist)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A time of book banning, red baiting and the denial of a woman's right to an abortion, Smith's 1950s are a dismal era redeemed only by their proximity to the 1960s. The two decades clash in the persons of lovers, husbands and wives in this uneven, heavy-handed Southwestern coming-of-age story. In 1956, 16-year-old Texan Jimbo Proctor is invited by his redneck Uncle Waylan and Waylan's second wife, left-leaning schoolteacher Vicky, to spend the summer working in a New Mexico oil patch. The boy leaps at the opportunity but soon learns that all is not well with his relatives' marriage. Waylan has in fact moved into his machine shop, where he is having an affair with his secretary, Sharon. While the specific reasons for the separation are foggy, the reasons that Waylan and Vicky got married are a complete mystery (Vicky, who reads Nabokov, defends the Rosenbergs and campaigns for Adlai Stevenson, complains with evident justice that Waylan would like to keep her "barefoot and in the kitchen"). To his credit, Jimbo falls for what appears to be a younger version of Vicky, 20-year-old college student Trudy, Sharon's cousin, who has come to New Mexico to wait tables at the local restaurant but reads Kerouac and dreams of becoming a novelist. In the meantime, she teaches Jimbo about bebop and the terrors of abortions. All of which would hold greater interest if Smith (Hunter's Trap) had created men a little worthier of these progressive women. Instead, the mismatch overwhelms a novel that views the grim side of the Eisenhower years from an intriguing perspective.
