A Woman Named Drown - Hardcover

Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including The Interrogative Mood and You & Me. His novel Edisto was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Little Star, and the Paris Review, and he is the recipient of the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Whiting Writers’ Award. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches writing at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida. 

Critics and readers lauded Edisto, Powell's first novel, for its originality and witty, mannered prose. His second book does not live up to expectations. The slim tale, narrated by a young man who abandons his doctorate program in chemistry to amass instead "lab notes of life," consists of a series of picaresque encounters with characters often identified only by labels (e.g., "the Veteran", "the Orphan"), none of whom is appealing and all of whom are eccentric to the point of grotesquery. The idiosyncracies of style that were endearing in Edisto are labored here to excess, and the book's campy tone becomes irritating early on. While Powell's ear for Southern speech is impeccable, the dialogue goes nowhere, and the narration is bogged down in murky philosophizing about life as a series of scientific chain reactions or as theater of the absurd. The narrator explains his reaction-series theory of existence in pseudoscientific language that slows an already nearly inert story. While he eventually comes to a somewhat hopeful conclusion about his future, the reader has long since ceased to care.
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