Local Souls

by Allan Gurganus

Overview

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award (Fiction) and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection

“This book underscores what we have long known—Gurganus stands among the best writers of our time.” —Ann Patchett

Through memorable language and bawdy humor, Gurganus returns to his mythological Falls, North Carolina, home of Widow. This first work in a decade offers three novellas mirroring today’s face-lifted South, a zone revolutionized around freer sexuality, looser family ties, and superior telecommunications, yet it celebrates those locals who have chosen to stay local. In doing so, Local Souls uncovers certain old habits—adultery, incest, obsession—still very much alive in our New South, a "Winesburg, Ohio" with high-speed Internet.

Wells Tower says of Gurganus, "No living writer knows more about how humans matter to each other." Such ties of love produce hilarious, if wrenching, complications: "Fear Not" gives us a banker's daughter seeking the child she was forced to surrender when barely fifteen, only to find an adult rescuer she might have invented. In "Saints Have Mothers," a beloved high school valedictorian disappears during a trip to Africa, granting her ambitious mother a postponed fame that turns against her. And in a dramatic "Decoy," the doctor-patient friendship between two married men breaks toward desire just as a biblical flood shatters their neighborhood and rearranges their fates.

Gurganus finds fresh pathos in ancient tensions: between marriage and Eros, parenthood and personal fulfillment. He writes about erotic hunger and social embarrassment with Twain's knife-edged glee. By loving Falls, Gurganus dramatizes the passing of Hawthorne’s small-town nation into those Twitter-nourished lives we now expect and relish.

Four decades ago, John Cheever pronounced Allan Gurganus "the most technically gifted and morally responsive writer of his generation." Local Souls confirms Cheever’s prescient faith. It deepens the luster of Gurganus’s reputation for compassion and laughter. His black comedy leaves us with lasting affection for his characters and the aching aftermath of human consequences. Here is a universal work about a village.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871407788
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/05/2014
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Allan Gurganus is widely translated, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Adaptations of his fiction have earned four Emmys, and his stories have been appearing in The New Yorker since 1974. He lives in a small town in North Carolina.

Editorial Reviews

"The pleasures of Allan Gurganus’ Local Souls are pretty much the pleasures of fiction, period: the satisfactions of the tale and the surprise of the phrase, insights into the human condition and portraits from a particular place, a sharp sense of the physical world and a freshened awareness of the pulls and pains of social class. Pick a page and you’ll find a sentence to love…. Dazzling."

Minneapolis Star Tribune - Kevin Fenton

"Refreshing. . . . an antidote to the marketplace’s mass message and massage. . . . The house of a master-magician-builder-writer. . . . Go ahead, step in, light up your life."

Garden & Gun - Clyde Edgerton

"Each novella in Local Souls…is guided by the centrifugal force of memory, heart and a playful, agile mind…Let these novellas bring attention to the overlooked art form. They will please readers who have been waiting for more from an admired writer who is funny, appropriately dark and can magically twirl a sentence."

Chicago Tribune, Editor's Choice - Elizabeth Taylor

"The beloved author whose literary bona fides rank him among the most revered writers of the last 50 years, Gurganus has an eye for gesture large and small, an ear for voice at once razor-sharp and tender, and a way with finding the absolutely precise moment of dramatic tension."

Boston Globe - Brett Lott

"Allan Gurganus has the uncanny ability to make you laugh and shudder at the same time. That rare gift is on full and glorious display here."

T. C. Boyle

"Vivid language, provocative sentence structure, and metaphors that elevate the reader’s consciousness. [Gurganus] shares with his southern cohorts a delight in discovering the quotidian within lives led under extraordinary, even bizarre circumstances."

Booklist

…if there remains any doubt of [Gurganus's] literary greatness…Local Souls should put it to rest forever…[it] is a tour de force in the tradition of Hawthorne. It shows that Gurganus's vast creative and imaginative powers, still rooted in the local, are increasingly universal in scope and effect. The book is an expansive work of love…The prose is taut with the electric charge of internal rhyme, assonance and alliteration. Each touch yields an invigorating shock…Like Chekhov and Cheever before him, Gurganus registers an enormous amount of compassion for the characters he holds to the fire. These local souls may be "fallen," but Gurganus seems well aware that the biblical fall also implies a promise: the chance to earn forgiveness, and perhaps even redemption.

The New York Times Book Review - Jamie Quatro

Decoy is the most dignified and searching of these novellas. It's got a lot to say about class—the narrator's family has "barely made the broad-jump from clay tobacco fields to red clay courts"—and just as much about the ways communities emotionally expand and contract. It has a soulful pang of heartache, especially over abandonment by close friends.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

Gurganus returns to Falls, N.C., the setting of his Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, with this trio of linked novellas. "Fear Not" subjects a smalltown golden girl to horrific loss, an unplanned pregnancy, and a lifetime of wondering about the fate of her baby. The protagonist of "Saints Have Mothers" reluctantly sees her luminous, gifted daughter off on a global adventure, and has her worst fears realized. As she handles her own grief and the unfolding spectacle of Falls's collective mourning, Gurganus ratchets up the inner keening and deftly balances it with a certain sense of escalating absurdity. In "Decoy," a family history gets spun out as a backdrop to the retirement of the town's senior physician, a friend and confidant to the narrator, Bill Mabry, who still sees himself as a bit of an interloper in the country club set. "He knew so much. And about us! Our septic innards, our secret chin-lifts, our actual alcohol intake in liters-per-day." But as Dr. Roper leaves his medical role, Mabry's sense of loss gets sharper as the two men grow more remote from each other. In these layered, often funny narratives, close reading is rewarded as Gurganus exposes humanity as a strange species. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Allan Gurganus proves once again that small-town life in the New South can be as tragic and twisted as anything out of an ancient Greek playbook…. The chatty, roundabout storytelling, the wicked humor and sense of the absurd often disguise the gravity of these investigations into life’s tendency to ‘retract its promise overight,’ to ‘become a vale of tears breaking over you in sudden lashing.’ Hidden above the safe confines of the Falls, Zeus readies his lightning bolts."

Atlanta Journal-Constitution - Gina Webb

"The first-person voice’s capacity for lifelikeness and oral illusion has been Gurganus’s great Southern storytelling inheritance… Local Souls stays true to its author’s vocal aesthetic."

New Yorker - Thomas Mallon

"Allan Gurganus breathes so much life into the town of Falls, North Carolina, his reader is able to walk down the streets and mingle with the local souls. This book underscores what we have long known—Gurganus stands among the best writers of our time."

Ann Patchett

"A serious and important American writer—his work has meant a lot to me over time… It’s good to have him back after a long absence."

New York Times - Dwight Garner

"Allan Gurganus is our verbal magician. He turns factual rabbits into poetic doves. Every sentence contains a surprise, but the brilliant surface doesn’t dazzle us from peering into the tender human depths."

Edmund White

"Gurganus [is] fearfully gifted…. The gem of Local Souls is the gorgeous Decoy, in which Gurganus removes the gloves and delivers the literary equivalent of a bare-knuckled knockout. Decoy is so good that you want to lob all sorts of adjectives its way: warm, humane, profound, sagacious, hilarious, nostalgic, and incisive…. The last pages of Local Souls prove once again that there is no writer alive quite like Allan Gurganus."

Miami Herald - Laura Albritton

"It’s been 12 years since Gurganus last published a full-length work—but if there remains any doubt of his literary greatness, his fifth book, Local Souls, should put it to rest forever…. A tour de force in the tradition of Hawthorne. It shows that Gurganus’s vast creative and imaginative powers, still rooted in the local, are increasingly universal in scope and effect. The book is an expansive work of love…Gurganus moves beyond [Sherwood] Anderson and Faulkner in calling into question the very notion of ‘inappropriate’: the emotional misalignments in his fiction feel both understandable and familiar. Like Chekhov and Cheever before him, Gurganus registers an enormous amount of compassion for the characters he holds to the fire."

Jamie Quatro

★ 09/15/2013
In this first work in 12 years, Gurganus offers three luscious, perceptively written pieces, each as rich as any full-length novel and together exploring the depth of our connections. The teenage girl who loses both father and virginity and takes 20 years to come full circle to the family tie that matters ("Fear Not"); the mother who's sacrificed all for a brilliant, do-gooding daughter worshipped in town even before she goes missing on a trip to Africa ("Saints Have Mothers"); and the not-quite-accepted-as-townie insurance man in an unequal relationship with the revered town doctor ("Decoy")—all are here in Falls, NC. Yes, Falls, the setting of Gurganus's immortal Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. In all three novellas, there's a pervasive sense of the power of community expectations and the question of whether we can challenge fate. "Fear Not" protagonist Susan escapes hers, while Bill in "Decoys," who says he was "either meant to be or love" Doc Roper, just seems stuck. VERDICT These pieces are so fresh and real that the reader has the sense of walking through a dissolving plate-glass window straight into the lives of the characters. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 3/25/13.]—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Library Journal

★ 2013-10-10
A witty and soulful trio of novellas by master storyteller Gurganus (Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, 1989, etc.), who claims his place here as the laureate of the Southern cul-de-sac. Falls, N.C.--the setting of Widow and a significant place in other moments of Gurganus-ian geography--is hicksville-turned–gated suburb, the milieu of sometimes-haunted, often dissatisfied souls with secrets to keep. Some of them, nestled among the dogwoods and carefully clipped yards, have seen more than they should. Some have found redemption of a kind, as with the protagonist of a story nested within a story in the opening piece, Fear Not, in which the gentle daughter of a local worthy learns of the son that she had to give up for adoption after having been raped by her godfather. She knew nothing about the child, "one taken without her even discovering its sex," but now, years later, she knows something of life--and all that is packed within just the first "act," as Gurganus calls it. Gurganus manages the neat hat trick of blending the stuff of everyday life with Faulkner-ian gothic and Chekhov-ian soul-searching, all told in assured language that resounds, throughout all three novellas, in artfully placed sententiae: "Some people's futures look so smooth, only sadists would bother delivering even temporary setbacks." "I soon learned: journalism and motherhood are two fields jet-fueled by frequent triage caffeine blasts." This being the South, the Civil War figures in sometimes-odd ways, from a subject of fiction to a matter of quotidian life; in the second novella, indeed, it's recapitulated in the struggle between exes on opposite coasts. Race figures, too, as Gurganus writes of the well-heeled duffers of Falls' premier country club as having "secret kinsmen hidden one or two counties away," a case in point, in a fine "A Rose for Emily" moment, being a "clay-colored" man who now stands among them. Whatever their subject, and told from widely different points of view--male and female, young and old--the novellas have a conversational tone and easy manner that are a testimony to the author's craftsmanship. A gem, like Gurganus' previous collection of novellas, The Practical Heart (2002). Readers will eagerly await the next news out of Falls.

Kirkus Reviews