In the Tennessee Country: A Novel - Softcover

Taylor, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312135211 ISBN 13: 9780312135218

Publisher: Picador, 1995

Synopsis

In 1916, a young boy, Nathan Longfort, is on the funeral train bearing the body of his grandfather, the Senator, from Washington, D.C., to Knoxville, Tennessee. The memory of this journey will haunt him for the rest of his life. On this trip, he meets the enigmatic Cousin Aubrey, a man of "irregular kinship," the black sheep of the Longfort clan. As the years pass, and Aubrey disappears into the world, Nathan begins to compulsively collect rumors about his faraway life―as Nathan's mother's first true love, a charmer of European society, a Don Juan, a worldly success―and sees it in stinging contrast to his own unfulfilled dreams of becoming an artist. Much later in life, the two men―now old―will meet again.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Taylor, the author of eight story collections, including The Old Forest and Other Stories (Picador) and three novels, including A Summons to Memphis, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and A Woman of Means (Picador), died in 1994. A Tennessee native, he had lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife, poet Eleanor Ross Taylor.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Taylor (The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court, 1993, etc.) has written a novel that reads like a stream-of-conscious autobiography, sprinkled with wonderful moments but without the sustaining power fiction requires to propel it. ``In the Tennessee country of my forebears it was not uncommon for a man of good character suddenly to disappear,'' begins Nat Longfort, the elderly narrator. An art critic and historian, Nat is obsessed with the fate of affluent Tennesseeans who set off on paths differing from those of their old families. Specifically, the memory of his mother's ``disappeared'' illegitimate cousin, Aubrey Tucker Bradshaw, haunts Nat, as do the ghosts of the genteel Confederate-era South. Throughout his life, Nat sees the mysterious Aubrey at family funerals and can only guess at what his cousin's life has become outside of the tight, although widespread, Taylor clan. Aubrey and Nat's mother nearly eloped when very young, and after their break, his mother suppressed all of her artistic inclinations, passing on her desires to her son. Nat himself had to make the difficult decision of whether to become a painter or an art critic. Meanwhile Nat's own son also is faced with the difficulty of making his way as an artist. There are many sly, humorous set pieces involving old Southern families and the academic life, and there are some wise and beautifully written epiphanies on the nature of art and love, yet the book is for the most part a rambling, repetitive hodgepodge of stories and themes that never quite coheres into a whole, despite the tidy and well- wrought ending. At times vintage Taylor--warm, evocative, and darkly humorous- -but it doesn't really hold up as a novel. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0312135211
• ISBN 13: 9780312135218
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208