Can't Quit You, Baby

by Ellen Douglas

Overview

“It is rare when a book this fine enters the world of contemporary American literature.” – The Boston Globe

Two women share a Mississippi household for fifteen years, rolling out piecrusts and making conversation. Cornelia is rich, white, and pampered, the mistress of the house, who oversees a seemingly perfect world of smooth surfaces and stubborn silence. Tweet, her housekeeper, is a poor, black, world-weary woman with a ghost-ridden past. As the years go by, Cornelia and Tweet each endure moments of uncertainty and despair; each, in her time of need, is rescued by the other.

In the footsteps of Southern writers like Peter Taylor, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor, Ellen Douglas celebrates the resiliency of the human spirit in this story of two women bound by transgression and guilt, memory and illusion, gratitude and love.

“Ellen Douglas is not just one of our best Southern novelists. She is one of our best American novelists.” – The New York Times Book Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140121025
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/01/1989
Series:	Contemporary American Fiction Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.05(w) x 7.73(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Ellen Douglas, whose real name is Josephine Haxton, was born in Natchez, Mississippi, and published her first novel, A Family's Affairs, in 1962. This first endeavor, as well as her short-story collection Black Cloud, White Cloud were both included in The New York Times Book Review's year's ten best listings. Her fourth novel, Apostles of Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1973. Now seventy-eight years old, she makes her home in Jackson, Mississippi.

Editorial Reviews

Those encountering Douglas (a pseudonym for Josephine Haxton, an acclaimed Mississippi writer) for the first time in this remarkable novel will want to read everything she has written. Set in Mississippi during the 1960s and '70s, the narrative at first seems simply the story of two womenCornelia and her black maid Julia (called Tweet by everyone but Cornelia). Initially, Tweet's is the more dramatic tale, featuring a kindly grandfather, a blackguard father, money hidden in a tree, adultery, blatant racismall related with wonderful detail and suspense. A more reserved, Southern ``lady'' who has insulated herself from the unpleasant aspects of life, Cornelia, in her 40s, has become deaf, which isolates her from her husband, two children and the real world. She begins a painful coming to terms, when her vision of life as a fairy tale (stemming from her Rapunzel-like rescue from a tower by the man she eventually married over her mother's objections) is shattered suddenly and tragically.. In a beautifully woven narrative whose complexity is only gradually revealed, the author shows how ``layers of circumstance and imagining,'' reality and illusion, inextricably entwine one individual with another. Powerful, poignant and wise, this novel surely confirms Douglas as one of our most important writers. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Veteran Southern author Douglas's eighth work of fiction is the compelling story of two women: white and affluent Cornelia and her irascible black maid Tweet. They recall the traumatic events that have shaped their lives: Cornelia eloped from her mother's iron fist, saw her husband's painful death, and bore a widow's grief; Tweet protected herself from her hateful father's arson, forgave her unfaithful mate, and came into Cornelia's employ. Becoming close friends, they face even worse ordeals together. Douglas's sure diction, natural idiom, emotional complexity, and feminine sensitivity render this an exceptional novel. Despite the tangible themes of rage, guilt, and sorrow, the narrative is refreshing for its redemptive powers. Edward C. Lynskey, Documentation, Altantic Research Corp., Alexandria, Va.

Library Journal