The Floatplane Notebooks
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This novel set in North Carolina is "warmly humorous, gossipy, and rich―a book with the soul of a family reunion" (The New York Times Book Review).
The Copeland family goes back a long way in North Carolina. Albert Copeland keeps a written record, of sorts, in some notebooks he bought back in 1956 to log the flights of his home-built floatplane. He embarked on that project when the kids were still little, but now they're all grown: Thatcher has a son of his own; Meredith and Mark are back from Vietnam; and Noralee is off dating hippies.
The notebooks are thick with the floatplane's failures to lift off, and bulging with color Polaroids of the wisteria blossoms near the family plot, favorite family dogs, and Thatcher and Bliss's wedding; records of Noralee's height and weight; a diagram of the graveyard; a newspaper story about wild-child Meredith's many backfired schemes. This novel travels back in time more than one hundred years, to the Copeland bride who first planted the wisteria by the back porch that would take over the surrounding woods, and then back to the present again to show how even though times change, people are pretty much the same.
"Among the wisest, most heartfelt writing to emerge from the South in our generation . . . Meredith Copeland's first-person account of his Vietnam experience, homecoming, and physical paralysis in North Carolina is breathtakingly stark, full, and real." ―Los Angeles Times
"The Floatplane Notebooks has all the marks of a master storyteller going straight for the mystery itself. All the marks, that is, of a new American classic." ―The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"A wonderful celebration of family and tradition, with warts, humor, tragedy, and triumph . . . An exceedingly rich book, a celebration of the human spirit that is brilliantly conceived, structured, and executed." ―The Cincinnati Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his third novel (after Raney and Walking Through Egypt ), Edgerton again demonstrates his ability to reveal character through sharply etched dialogue and wildly hilarious circumstance. He also achieves a deeper resonance in this story of the blue-collar Copeland family of North Carolina. The voices of various narrators produce a composite family portrait that takes the Copelands from the placid summer of 1956 to the Vietnam War years of the '60s. In Edgerton's deceptively simple prose, we learn about such traditions as grave-cleaning day, the annual hunting trip to Florida and Albert Thatcher's ongoing, seemingly doomed efforts to construct a floatplane with aluminum pontoons. Another narrative voicethat of the wisteria vine that overruns the graveyardalso imparts family secrets; this, however, is a labored device that hampers credibility. In all other respects, the novel is absorbing as the voices obliquely reveal family relationships, personality clashes, sibling rivalry and small-town social mores. But the tale becomes gripping and wrenchingly vivid when Meredith Copeland and his cousin Mark Oakley enlist in the military and are sent to Southeast Asia. Here, too, is when the reader discovers that Edgerton is not a predictable writer; he turns our expectations head over heels, showing how circumstances can change character in surprising ways. This is a mature novel in which Edgerton's subtle mastery of his craft is made increasingly clear. BOMC featured selection; QPBC alternate.
