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Hardcover book is in new, never been read condition.
Dust jacket is also like new. Inside of book pages are crisp and clean. Very
slight shelf wear on jacket. 2001 edition. ISBN 078686656X. Publisher: Theia.
317 pages long. Approx Size: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1. Additional pictures of condition
are always available.
BOOK DESCRIPTION: The lifeline of Melinda Haynes's novel Chalktown is a
rutted, meandering dirt road that winds its way past the murky waterways and
through the one-shop towns and backwoods of George County, Mississippi. It's
also a red flag to anyone looking for a good dose of surreal Southern
gothic. Here is the isolated shack of a disintegrating white-trash family,
there the village dwellers who communicate solely by writing notes on the
chalkboards in their front yards. One character is grotesquely scarred by an
adult bout with chicken pox, while others are eaten up by less identifiable
diseases and appetites. Dreams are pursued, discarded, and eerily enacted,
always in the sort of luscious, graphic prose you would expect from the
author of Mother of Pearl.
Perhaps the term family is a misnomer for the Sheehands, a bunch of misfits
drawn together by impulse and wrenched apart by hope, desire, and murder.
Fairy, the philandering father camped out in an old school bus, can't
extricate himself from the burden of "women and their sticky flaws." His
wife, Susan-Blair, is slowly burying herself beneath other people's
possessions in her makeshift consignment store, even as she neglects her
children and chats it up with the ever-present Christ of her Pentecostal
upbringing. No wonder 16-year-old Hezekiah sets off down the road to
Chalktown in the opening pages of the novel, carrying his disabled brother
in a backpack. His encounters along the way make for a Robert Altman-like
series of takes on the bizarre nature of reality in George County.
The literary landscape of the Deep South is, of course, teeming with
eccentric characters. Yet Haynes's are so fleshed-out that the reader is
left feeling almost crowded, like (to quote Susan-Blair) a "durn closet full
a somebody else's coats. Coats put there by people who went on to someplace
else, some other thing." The author is no less gifted at conveying a sense
of place. She uses the colorful brushstrokes of a painter--which she also
happens to be--to imbue this story with a dark, sultry, and unmistakably
Southern feel.
A photo gallery of pictures from this book is shown below
as well as a description of the pictures. Any questions please
email me
aldergrove@ppowner.com
