A Short History of a Small Place
by T. R. Pearson
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Book Summary Information
Author: T. R. PearsonEdition: Paperback
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2003-09-30
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Penguin.
Book Reviews of A Short History of a Small Place
Book Review: An Overlooked Classic
Summary: 5 Stars
A friend who has lived in the same small town for most of her childhood and adult life told me A Short History of a Small Place describes the experience and code of a finite particle of the world with exactitude, and I, who grew up in more congested, pluralistic places, finally feel that I get it for having read this book. I also feel that I've been roundly entertained.
TR Pearson's debut novel is an accomplished work that creates an airtight world. He achieves this through the narrative voice of a young boy, Louis Benfield, Jr., born circa 1964 in Neely, North Carolina, a beloved only child who channels all of the local history of the type that is never written down, but told over and over again at the kitchen table, over the neighbor's fence, in the beauty salon and the post office lobby. The collective gaze of Neely is on Miss Myra Angelique Pettigrew, the eccentric wealthy spinster sister of the late mayor who lives reclusively in the family mansion with her pet chimpanzee, Mr. Britches. In the tradition Louis relays, there is no straightforward way to work through Miss Pettigrew's story, to understand her better, without digressing all over town. Accordingly, the story of just about everyone else gets told along the way.
In an era when the term "comic novel" does not always translate as something that is "funny" or "hilarious," this book is laugh out loud most of the time. The Christmas pageant gone awry is a classic (let's just say the director thought real animals would enhance the indoor production). Somehow Pearson wrings the hilarity out of the absurdities at the same time he humanizes them. The tragedies that are part and parcel of life peek out from the skirts of the narrative, more felt than told. By the end, as Louis matures into adolescence and Neely is courted by the impersonal franchises that paved over America in the late 20th century, we all feel like we are standing on the streets of our own town, trying hard to remember what once gave it mythic proportions.
Summary of A Short History of a Small Place
"Pearson's is a different and distinctive voice and a most welcome one. In this novel his talent shows sparks of genius."THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
Young Louis Benfield tells the story of his tiny little North Carolina town. There is the looniness of his family, the town of characters, the charm and naviete that gives us a world unknown, and stories that deserve to be told about how it is to grow up a certain kind of way, and to suddenly discover there's a world beyond your own that calls to you....
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