Float Up, Sing Down
-
- $16.99
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
From National Book Award Finalist Laird Hunt, a masterful collection of interwoven stories capturing one summer's day in Reagan-era Indiana.
Candy Wilson has forgotten to buy the paprika. Turner Davis needs to get his zinnias in. Della Dorner told her mother she was going to Milky Freeze, but that's not where she's really headed on her new Schwinn five-speed.
Float Up, Sing Down is the story of a single day. But in that day, how much teeming life! The residents of this rural town have their routines, their preferences, their joys, grudges, and regrets. The old-timers savor past triumphs, cast back to lives circumscribed and defined by the World Wars, wonder what might have been. Youngsters covet cars, karate moves, kissing; they writhe in the first blushes of love or pain or independence. Gossip is paramount. Lives are entwined. Retired sheriffs climb corn bins and muse on lost love, French teachers throw firecrackers out of barn windows, and teenagers borrow motorcycles to ride the back roads.
Each of the fourteen stories of Float Up, Sing Down follows one character's 'day-in-the-life' in one of Hunt's most beloved and enduring landscapes. As the book unfolds these lives echo and glance off of one another with elegance and warmth, a tenderness born of strength. In the tradition of Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Elizabeth Strout, and Edward P. Jones, this is a symphony of souls, a masterful portrait of both loneliness and community by one of our great limners of American experience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hunt's amiable collection of 14 interconnected character studies (after Zorrie) is set over the course of one day in the early 1980s. The connective tissue of the stories, each of which is titled after its protagonist, is the characters' Indiana hamlet, friendly on the surface but riven with subterranean traumas. Candy, an older woman who hosts the monthly bingo club, was close with Irma, who has recently died by suicide. Horace, a bachelor, is a WWII veteran and retired farmer who mows the lawn and goes for a walk to avoid dwelling on his combat experiences on D-Day. Della is a high school student training for the track team who secretly meets classmate Sugar Henry in his parents' barn, where she trades him kisses for Kraft Cheese Singles. A young man named Toby, whom Hunt implies is neurodivergent, derives satisfaction from the people who honk at the signs he holds on the side of the road ("Honk If You Love the Gipper"; "Honk If You Love Jesus"). Though Hunt's portraits don't quite cohere into a narrative, they do convincingly capture the era and a sense of place. Fans of Hunt's previous small-town studies will appreciate these lovingly drawn portraits.