Heavenly Days

by James Wilcox

Striving to find a foothold in the modern world despite her lack of computer skills, receptionist Lou Jones finds her life unexpectedly complicated by a music society, a gun-wielding tax assessor, a busybody mother, and her unemployed husband. Reprint.

Genres: Fiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

James Wilcox (b. 1949 in Hammond, Louisiana) is an American novelist and a professor at LSU in Baton Rouge.

Wilcox is the author of eight comic novels set in, or featuring characters from, the fictional town of Tula Springs, Louisiana. Wilcox's first book Modern Baptists (1983) remains his best known work. His other novels are North Gladiola (1985), Miss Undine's Living Room (1987), Sort of Rich (1989), Polite Sex (1991), Guest of a Sinner (1993), Plain and Normal (1998), Heavenly Days (2003), and Hunk City (2007). Wilcox is also the author of three short stories that were published in The New Yorker between 1981 and 1986, three of only four short stories that the author has published. He has written book reviews for The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, and two pieces for ELLE. He was the subject of an article by James B. Stewart in The New Yorker's 1994 summer fiction issue; entitled "Moby Dick in Manhattan", it detailed his struggle to survive as a writer devoted purely to literary fiction.

Wilcox, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, has held the Robert Penn Warren Professorship at Louisiana State University since September 2004. He is also the director of the university's creative writing program.

Reviews

[🐴 🍖]

hoo boy that's a lot of plot. i mean, my dude jimmy w's always favored a plot with some filigree, but here we got such a fractal web of circumstance & coincidence & campus politics & bunion surgery that yer characteristic wilcoxian interplay of frivolous dialogue and ethically grave situation gets crowded out kinda. it's particularly a bummer that the novel never really explores the comic possibilities of lou's employer "waistwatchers," a born-again version of weight watchers (!). on the other hand, lou's distress at being unable to pinpoint mrs ompala's racial/religious/class identity is rly cleverly portrayed, & you gotta love a novel that features ostrich goulash. in sum, not quiiiiiite as fire emoji 100 emoji money eyes emoji as mod baps/n gladiola/miss undine, but if you read & enjoyed those, what harm could one more do?

[Cheryl · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the strangest book I've read this year. Lou is a quirky character surrounded by other people who are almost as weird. I could not find any plot line that carried through the book, just different scenes with Lou doing outlandish things. If there was a point to the book and a good reason for reading it, I totally missed it.

[Jill Cordry · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wish I could give it zero stars. Reading this book reminded me of listening to an audio book with the player set to "shuffle".

[Kim Jordahl · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not sure how this book ended up on my shelf, but I regret it.

[Paddy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm unwilling to read past p. 5. Why make southerners look so bad? I am one and I know it's easy to dumb us down in literature, but such broad "humor" is not humorous. Read Handling Sin, by Michael Malone instead, friends.

[Jenn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ugh! I hate putting a book down and giving up on it, but there is no way I could have continued reading this book. I read over 50 out of 200 and was dreading reading anymore.

[Billie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very confusing character development. I had trouble keeping all the relationship straight.

[Annemariem · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't really get it. Although I loved an earlier book of his: 'polite sex', this one sort of let me down. I'm starting on Good Behaviour by Molly Keane now. Hopefully that'll be better.