Captain Bennett's Folly
-
- $7.99
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
Captain Bennett’s Folly is a direct descendant of Fleming’s earlier comic novels, Colonel Effingham's Raid and Lucinderella. Like them, there is a narrator—in this case Walker Williams—who reports an adventure replete with rogues and innocents, while making an artful, funny and wistful case about the immorality of our times. Walker spins out a tale of how he and his hedonistic family journey to the Florida Keys during the hurricane season in order to prevent rich Uncle Nolan Bennett—“pushing eighty but not pushing very hard”—from marrying his young housekeeper and supplanting them as his legitimate heirs. The scheming relatives, however, have a tough adversary in the eccentric Uncle Nolan, and his struggles to escape from their manipulation are at the core of Fleming’s yarn.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Walker Williams is bright, lazy, a tad too selfish to be attractive and a more or less sane member of a Southern Gothic family. The Williams-Vidrine clan (Walker, rapacious Mamma, lubricious Sisterbaby and sleazy stepfather Stacy) are living beyond their means, and plan to hustle octogenarian Uncle Nolan out of some valuable Georgia property. Walker, dispatched to the Florida Keys to scout out Nolan's possible relationship with his young widow housekeeper, discovers that Nolan dreams of conversations with a God-like ``Mr.C'' about his human ``Experiment'' But courtly Uncle Nolan is not entirely daft and triumphs over the attempts of his unpleasant kin to commit him. The novel offers a witty, mordant, basically good-natured look at us and our times; rejected by 20 publishers a decade ago, it is a triumph for its 90-year-old author ( Colonel Ef fing ham's Raid ; Lucinderella ). Nominated for a Nobel Prize and still writing, Fleming is a kind of national treasure. Lovers of good fiction will cherish this example of his work.
