In a Sweet Magnolia Time

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 12 SEPT 2005

Judge J. Waties Waring (1880 1968) was a South Carolina federal judge in the old-school mode, until, sometime in the 1940s following an unseemly divorce and instant remarriage a slow progressive conversion took hold. First-time novelist and journalist Wintner looks mostly at the aftermath, not for Waring but for his prot g Arthur Covingdale. Covingdale was supposed to follow Waring to the federal bench, but after Waring's shift destroyed that career path, Covingdale helped burn a cross on Waring's lawn. Wintner's novel takes place mostly in the fractious 1960s, focusing on Covingdale's struggle to understand why he terrorized the judge, and how Covingdale himself fits into a social structure whose foundation is crumbling. Wintner, who lived in South Carolina, uses phonetic spellings to getting at its dialects, but the narrative's setup is flat and long-winded. Once Covingdale begins an intimate relationship with a woman of color, all of his inner turmoil is externalized and his demons and dilemmas leap out of the shadows. Wintner ends up nicely illuminating a corner of a turbulent era.