Goliath: A Novel

by Susan Woodring

Overview

When Percy Harding, Goliath's most important citizen, is discovered dead by the railroad tracks outside town one perfect autumn afternoon, no one can quite believe it's really happened. Percy, the president of the town's world-renowned furniture company, had seemed invincible. Only Rosamond Rogers, Percy's secretary, may have had a glimpse of how and why this great man has fallen, and that glimpse tugs at her, urges her to find out more.

Percy isn't the first person to leave Rosamond: everybody seems to, from her husband, Hatley, who walked out on her years ago; to her complicated daughter Agnes, whose girlhood bedroom was papered with maps of the places she wanted to escape to. The town itself is Rosamond's anchor, but it is beginning to quiver with the possibility of change. The high school girls are writing suicide poetry. The town's young, lumbering sidewalk preacher is courting Rosamond's daughter. A troubled teenaged boy plans to burn Main Street to the ground. And the furniture factory itself—the very soul of Goliath—threatens to close.

In the wake of the town's undoing, Rosamond seeks to reunite the grief-shaken community. Goliath, a story of loss and love, of forgiveness and letting go, is a lyrical swoon of a novel by an exceptionally talented newcomer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429941532
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/24/2012
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	434 KB

About the Author

SUSAN WOODRING grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. Her previous publications are a first novel, The Traveling Disease, and Springtime On Mars: Stories. She has been published in Passages North and a variety of other literary publications. She won the 2006 Isotope Editor's Prize, has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and was a notable mention in Best American Short Stories 2010.

Editorial Reviews

Like a contemporary Winesburg, Ohio, Susan Woodring's Goliath brings small town life beautifully, achingly alive. Sprinkled with marching bands, baseball, and parades, and a cast of southern characters who will charm the pants off you, Goliath is a memorable novel, written in a new memorable voice.” —Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle

“Goliath is a careful, contemplative study of the rhythms of collective grief. Woodring's sense of the constraints and hard-earned pleasures of home rings as true and pure as a train whistle in the night.” —Michael Parker, author of The Watery Part of the World

“Woodring's writing is so clear and moving that the reader often feels, as she says of about one of her characters, as if 'the world had been sucked clear of true sound.' This beautiful portrait of a place and its people, rendered so quietly and intimately, shuts out the world outside its pages as you read. Only the best novels can make you forget yourself as reader. Goliath is the kind of book you don't want to put down or to end.” —Brad Watson, author of The Heaven of Mercury

“Goliath is a beautiful and quietly moving story of love, grief, forgiveness and redemption — heady themes handled here with a big heart and a deft hand. In prose exquisitely clear and with details that will make your heart ache, Susan Woodring has written a meaningful portrait of small town life, and what it means to move through grief toward love.” —Bret Lott, author of Ancient Highway

“Goliath is wonderful! The minute I finished reading it, I went out and bought three more copies to give to friends.Woodring's empathy and understanding of all these characters seems boundless—-in my mind's eye, I can still see Rosamond right now, walking the streets in her vintage clothes, that orange jacket——what a book!” —Lee Smith, author of Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

From the Publisher

A factory owner's suicide hastens the decline of a small town. Woodring (Springtime on Mars, 2008, etc.) doesn't specify the state, but her fictional Goliath is clearly in the South, and the fact that the on-the-brink-of-bankruptcy factory makes furniture suggests her native North Carolina. It's a mild October day when teenaged Vincent Bailey finds the crushed body of Percy Harding on the railroad tracks, but cold weather and hard times are coming. Percy's death has changed Goliath's zeitgeist, thinks police chief Clyde Winston: "It was as if every person in town had put their own bodies in way of the train and were all broken now, spiritless." Mood-directing statements like this dot the narrative, which swoops in and out of many lives. Central among them is Rosamond Rogers, who was Percy's secretary and has become a reluctant repository of her neighbors' confidences about everything from stealing candy to deliberately pricking babies with diaper pins. None of the confidences seem to justify the book's lugubrious atmosphere, nor does the main action, which shows Rosamond and her daughter Agnes groping for love with Clyde and his son Ray, county groundskeeper and freelance preacher. (Rosamond's traveling-salesman husband left years ago; Agnes has dropped out of college and a sort-of marriage to return to Goliath, though she's not quite sure why.) A more baroque plotline follows Vincent, radically unsettled by his discovery of Percy's corpse, in his reckless friendship with the equally troubled Cassie, who incites the boy to eat increasingly dangerous objects (culminating in a live mouse) and to rob houses with her. These stories, and many other subordinate ones, develop very slowly, and Woodring's tone adds to the sense of stasis—she mistakes portentousness for seriousness and proclamations for insights. The climax, complete with a parade, a baseball game and a cataclysmic fire, is much too obviously designed to ensure "that Goliath should end in devastation and miracle." Woodring's ambitions exceed her accomplishments here.

Kirkus Reviews