The last of how it was : a novel /

In his third installment (after A Short History of a Small Place and Off for the Sweet Hereafter of hilarious adventures narrated by young Louis Benfield of Neely, N.C., Pearson again spins a rollicking yarn with somber undertones and reveals himself to be a shrewd social commentator. Essentially the chronicle of the pursuit of a stolen Chevrolet that ends with the murder of a black man, the kernel of the story is embroidered on, digressed from, told and retold with deepening significance each time. Everything that goes on in the real worldincluding the sordid and the profaneis here as the darker side of the crazy quilt Pearson stitches. He clearly is quite fond of his redneck characters, but underlying the comic patter and the outrageous antics is a depiction of Southern prejudice and racism; the authentic and unsanitized dialogue includes the word ``nigger,'' correct for the time but, nevertheless, potentially offensive to some. Pearson is still a wizard with headlong, run-on sentences and inspired set pieces, but sometimes he is a bit too obfuscatory here for clarity. Yet, although it takes longer to get going than the earlier volumes, the narrative abounds in ``your conflict . . . your crisis, . . . your complication . . . your pacing, . . . your poetical ve-locity'' and plenty more. (September 14) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Though it stands fight wondrous on its own, this third novel by Pearson finishes his remarkable trilogy about matters life-enhancing and death-bearing in and about Neely, North Carolina--a town that henceforth should be fixed in our geography of the imagination. Young and wide-eyed Louis Benfield, Jr., here returns to tell ""the why of it and the how of it."" And that ""it"" is a twice-told tale of racial violence perpetrated by the ""shortsighted"" and ""foolish"" men on his Momma's side of the family. So it's no surprise that Daddy delights in enlightening the boy about ""the blood thing"" that twice resulted in your various Younts exacting some cruel justice. Great-uncle Jack, recognized as an idiot even by his mule, Spud, is hornswoggled time and again until, with dreams of becoming a mule-baron, he takes to trading, in the course of which one scurrilous Indian absconds with Jack's finest. Years later, Granddaddy Yount reenacts Jack's murderous vengeance--though, in fact, it was Great-aunt Della, herself from ""a frothy people,"" what done the deadly deed. When Granddaddy catches up with a car-thieving Negro, he pounds the life from him--a tragic act with an aftermath that foretells an era of upheaval and change. But this sobering story comes after lots of drunkenly comic yarn-spinning--narrative asides that contribute to ""the drama of the thing."" We learn about the rough Cotten clan (""they were your basic and fundamental eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth and incapabilities for incapabilities sort of people"") who threaten to castrate a local bootlegger for allegedly causing Robert Earl Cotten's impotency; then there's the time Matrimony Creek Odom's prison-break provided a perfect cover for lots of adulterous wives, including Ray Mires' who cuckolded her husband with his brother, Roy. The more sordid the better as far as Daddy's concerned. And he punctuates his tales--as Louis, Jr., here tells it--with lots of circumlocutory vulgarity and enough cussing, spitting, and belching to make his wife and her spinster aunt blush to high heaven. We're reminded here that there are ""rules and properties to the telling of a thing."" As this amazingly rich and complex trilogy attests, Pearson knows them all well. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.