Edisto

Edisto #1

by Padgett Powell

A novel that has drawn comparisons with the work of J. D. Salinger, Truman Capote, and Flannery Oâ Connor, Edisto centers on one Simons Everson Manigault, a twelve-year-old possessed of a vocabulary and sophistication way beyond his years and a preadolescent bewilderment with the behavior of adults. These include his mother, who is known as the Duchess, and his enigmatic father-surrogate, Taurus. Imbued with a strong sense of placeâ an isolated strip of South Carolina coast called Edistoâ Padgett Powellâ s novel is â truly remarkable . . . both as a narrative and in its extraordinary use of languageâ (Walker Percy).

Genres: Fiction, Southern, Novels, Coming Of Age, Classics, Book Club, Contemporary

183 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Padgett Powell is the author of four novels, including Edisto, which was nominated for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Esquire, and other publications, as well as in the anthologies Best American Short Stories and Best American Sports Writing. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches writing at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida.

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simons (just one M) Manigault is coming of age on Edisto Island. His mother is a professor, known as the Doctor or the Duchess. She's eccentric. Simons favorite picture of her is when he is pouring water on her as she lay face down drunk in the sand. His father, the Progenitor, took the picture back before the separation. He's a successful lawyer and would like to move them to Hilton Head where Simons can play baseball and go to a fancy school. Simons doesn't like baseball.

But the Duchess has a different regimen in mind for Simons, already precocious at 3. So his bassinet becomes a library. Added to this incubator is the history of Edisto (not spelled out). Once a slave port, the island swelled with free blacks after the Civil War. So Simons, at 13, reads; he writes stories; he wonders at the mystery of his mother; and he does all this as a white boy in a black culture.

I loved the language of this book. I loved the cadence. The paragraphs sound and look as if they should be put to music. Lessons, given and received.

"Another thing, you can't profane this mash pit, because of Jake's boy."
"Who's Jake's boy?"
"He's Jake's boy, but it's on the q.t. because he's in Bull Street in the retard section. I've never seen him. The story is, they fed him the wood chips for coloring the shine and he ate them like potato chips and that did it. All they meant to do was kind of slow him down so they didn't have to mind him so close, but it slowed him down further than they figured."

This book also talks about Race, without ever saying WE'RE TALKING ABOUT RACE.

I think everyone should read this.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Practically every time I am tempted to read critically lauded book it turns out to be far below my expectations. But actually it’s a small wonder – critics serve the publication industry and establishment and not a reader.
The twelve year old hero has a grownup’s advanced vocabulary and child’s rudimentary thoughts clearly induced by the author himself.
“Between living and dying, she had made two mistakes. One was letting her daughter go to New York to be a singer, and the other was letting them take her daughter’s baby from its grandmother, herself, who got there in time to get it and take it home and raise it right, whether he was half white or not and sick. It was the sick that got him away from her, the sick that her daughter gave it, junk in it. Her daughter in New York messed up on drugs and taking things called fixes got the baby away from her and got her half convinced he was going to die so she let them take him and then she was never able to get him back and her fool daughter crazy enough to go to a place like that was too crazy to want him if she could have had him and she was just an old colored lady a long way from home and she left. It grinded her up to think about it and she never forgot it and she knew it was not true about having only to die and live till you die. You had to be careful somewhere in between or you could be chased by something like losing your daughter’s baby because you weren’t careful somewhere else, and you lost your daughter herself or she lost her sense, which is the same. You could be chased by it and even caught up with.”
Edisto is too artificial to be convincing enough.
They compare Edisto to the work of J.D. Salinger and Truman Capote but in fact it sits between them like a spooky tooth between two fangs.

[Samadrita]

After nearly 2 months of trying to plod through this book and develop some sort of connection with it, I give up. Perhaps it's the erratic narration, the rapidly changing scenarios or a bunch of new characters appearing on every alternate page and scattering in the next one like headless chickens. Whatever it is I will have to remember that Padget Powell's brand of Southern Literature just doesn't work for me, finalist for the National Book Award or not.
I would rather spend my reading time experiencing the dizzying disorientation induced by Faulkner's narration rather than Powell's.

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

this book started well but faded and wasn't to my taste in the end

[Lisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unusual prose, some of it blistering. And by "some of it" I mean two sentences. The rest is annoyingly self-important blather. Sure, the author flouts convention. But convention is there for a reason, in this case READABILITY.
What seems inventive and fresh in snippets quickly becomes grating. Grating like that person behind you in the movie theatre eating malted milk balls one after another, chewing furiously. Grating like the woman in the cubicle next to you at work scratching her head with the tip of a steel nail file. Scritch scritch scritch. You know what that noise is only because you kept hearing it and snuck a look. Aren't you sorry now?

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book jumped up to a five star read when I added the audio to my reading experience. I would read a chapter and then listen to a chapter or so. The audio let you get a feel for the language. It’s a story told from our narrator who is 12 but doesn’t write or speak like a 12 year old. I enjoyed his seriousness, funniness/quirkiness, and insights on human behavior. This book worked for me from the very beginning. The descriptions were fantastic of the place and people

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

For years I’d heard about folks interested to get a first edition copy of this novel, so I’d assumed it was a classic. Written in the time before Goodreads, it does not have a long history of reviews there, but I trust many members have read this classic since it first came out in 1985. Republished now as an ebook under the aegis of Open Road Media, this little gem gets a new airing.

A young boy grows up in his single mother’s beachside home in South Carolina. She works all day as a professor so often leaves him to his own devices. He makes friends among the locals, his maid’s friends, and chums at the local public school. Thinking that a little encouragement from birth might make a difference in his development as a writer of repute, his mother surrounds his crib with classic literature. He is given a notebook in which to record his adventures.

Our boy, Simons (pronounced Simmons) Everson Manigault, is twelve. He has a vocabulary that belies his chronological age, but there is much about the world he still needs to learn. The mysteries of adulthood top his list.

Written in dialect and in the sketchy way of a journal, this may be a little hard to follow at first, but rewards the reader in the end. I recommend plowing through, for by the end you have entered into the language, the time, the place, and the ethos. Circling back to the start once again, you will realize how much you understood, and how much you would still like to glean from this marvelous harvest. We understand, deep in our bones, what has happened here, and how the world, truly a mystery to an adolescent who has no grasp of larger issues, appears to unfurl in all its tattered glory.

[Graceann · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is as if this author took a creative writing course, and then decided that they were ready to do a novel. Every novelistic cliche is present here, and it's boring beyond belief. Don't waste your time.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This character is a near perfect creation even though Simons is twelve and has a bigger vocabulary than Ernest Hemingway. Powell's writing inspires trust and the reader doesn't question that this boy talks this way. His mother, the Doctor, wants Simons to be a great literary star. He's supposed to be writing a novel at her request. His mother drinks at home while his father, the Progenitor, has left after a disagreement with the Doctor over how to raise Simons. Soon, a surrogate takes his place, whom Simons calls Taurus. Taurus initiates Simons into black culture (Taurus is mixed race) by taking him drinking at the Grand where Simons meets Jake, et al. Finally, Simons realizes Taurus and his mother have been lovers, just before the Progenitor moves back in. The prose is electric and full of irony. Powell's syntax is distinct, the language rich and fresh. A pleasure to read, Edisto took me only a day to finish. I recommend highly and plan to read it again and again.

[Brynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that I will read again in ten, five, or maybe two years. It was beautifully written from the perspective of a young boy growing up in a small town around the Prohibition Era. I can't say I understood all of it, but it was beautiful. The plot can be disjointed in a way vaguely reminiscnet of Steinbeck's writing. I will come back to Edisto to visit its beaches, the Baby Grand, and the strange world of this boy.

(After rereading, 1/31)
The writing is still as lovely as the first time I read it. The speech patterns of the main character are challenging at first, but they add to the atmosphere of the story. Simons Everson Manigault is smart, thoughtful, and someone I hope I would have been friends with if we grew up together. A Huckleberry Finn type with more booksmarts.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

It always concerns me when someone compares a book to Catcher in the Rye. It’s done too often and I’ve yet to find a book that truly measures up to Salinger’s classic. But I try and not let it put me off and to judge every book on its own merits. Of course now I’ve read Edisto I can see why people might want to compare it to Catcher in the Rye—they’re clearly wanting to compliment Powell on a job well done (and he has done a good job, no arguments there)—but it really doesn’t need to be compared to anything for that to be true. Edisto is a coming of age story but there are hundreds of those and its protagonist, Simons Manigault (pronounced ‘Simmons’), really has little in common with Holden other than a distinctive voice and a daft name. Both narrators styles are distinguished by certain stylistic ticks but Simons’s tone is the more affected of the two and his unnecessarily-convoluted narration makes this a far harder read than I expected; you have to concentrate to follow him and his sentences are not short. Your typical twelve-year-old—if there even is such a thing—he most certainly is not.

Edisto is a place. It’s in South Carolina. And it’s tiny. New York it is not. More people live in a New York city block than in the whole of Edisto. And yet Simons and Holden do have one thing in common: their problems stem from their families. Of course most pubescent boys think that and a lot of the time it will be true too. Simons refers to his father as the Progenitor and his mother as the Doctor although the local blacks call her the Duchess. His parents are separated and he lives with his mother who believes her son to possess a capacity for literary genius:

Well, it’s true [that aged three] I couldn’t tie a shoe or stop wetting the bed, but those Golden Books never gave me a problem. And then it was on to all these award children’s books about contemplative rabbits, and llamas that talk and go both ways, which I didn’t know at the time was preparing me for faculty parties.

[…]

Some get to goo-goo, I had to read.

Now he’s twelve and as literate and literary as any English professor although probably nowhere near as articulate; left to his own devices he’s developed his own idiosyncratic—and often both entertaining and amusing—approach to communication, part slang, part dialect but mostly the kind of words kids his age have never heard of and wouldn’t be interested in using if they had.

There’s not much story to Edisto. The boy bums around on his own—not unreasonably be doesn’t have a huge circle of friends but the nothing’s huge in Edisto. He spends most of the book hanging around with a guy he calls Taurus and doesn’t seem to mind being called Taurus even though that’s not his name. Here’s how we’re introduced to Taurus:

We are well into that kind of dance this evening when Taurus shows up. Elbows on the drain counter, I am keeping my weight off my ribs and watching the food cook when I see him. You do not know what in hell may be out here on a hoodoo coast and I do not make a move. What follows is not nearly so ominous as I would sound. He don’t ax-murder us or anything like that. Yet there is something arresting about this dude the moment you see him. He is shimmery as an islander's god and solid as a butcher. I consider him to be the thing that the Negroes are afraid of when they paint the doors and windows of their shacks purple or yellow. His head is cocked, his hand on the washtub of the Doctor’s old wringer, its old manila rolling pins swung out to the side. When he comes up to the screen, I know I have seen his face before.

That's the assignment. To tell what has been going on since this fellow came trying to serve a subpoena to we think Athenia’s daughter and scared Theenie so bad it about blued her hair. Before he came I spent most of my time at the Baby Grand—Marvin’s R.O. Sweet Shop and Baby Grand, where I am a celebrity because I’m white, not even teenage yet, and possess the partial aura of the Duchess ("The Duchess boy heah!"). And I look like I hold I my liquor ("Ain’t he somp’m."). The trick there is to accept a new can when anybody offers and let your old one get drunk by somebody else.

Why exactly his mother takes to and, more importantly, trusts this man who has appeared as a process server—and does indeed carry out that kind of work during his short stay—and maintains he’s the grandson of their maid, Theenie I have no idea. Nor am I sure why Theenie hightails out of there when he arrives leaving her accommodation empty for him to move straight into. But “the assignment” Simons’s mother gives him—basically the book she asks him to write—is a what-I-did-this-Summer kind of report. And that’s what he does, he says what he and Taurus get up.

What Taurus and his mother get up to he’s oblivious of until it’s too late. Although he’s not stupid he’s only a certain kind of clever and Life really has to beat him about the head and neck to get him to pay attention to stuff that most normal folks would’ve cottoned onto within minutes. But that’s part of his charm. There’s a bit of a Huck Finn about him too which never hurts but really not much happens and the book’s real pleasure is in the boy’s descriptions of his life. Catcher in the Rye it is not. Nor is it Huckleberry Finn. Some have hated it and I can see why. I can see to why some might’ve given it five stars but to my mind that’s being blinded by style over content and you need both to my mind. For me Powell doesn’t pull it off. I far preferred You & Me.

[Petergiaquinta · Rating 4 out of 5]

I confess I'd never heard of this book or author until my own eccentric mother (shades of the Doctor?) dropped two mint copies of Edisto and Edisto Revisited on my coffee table last summer, along with a book on Mesopotamian mythology and a few other things I made her take with her when she left. I'm sure she picked them all up for a few cents at some estate sale or somewhere and I didn't really plan to read them until I was shuffling things around recently and noticed on the cover that Saul Bellow, Walker Percy and Donald Barthelme all thought this was a helluva book. And I figured those three guys couldn't all be wrong. And they weren't.

Simons Everson Manigault is a fascinating character with a great voice, but Percy is wrong in his back-cover blurb: it's not better than Catcher in the Rye, but that's not even the book to compare it to...Edisto is more like a little something Faulkner might have tossed off in between novels, if he had written a few decades later.

So I finished it today at lunch while I was eating a steak, a pretty rare treat for a Sunday meal, and I liked it so much that I picked up Edisto Revisited and finished my salad to that...apparently young Simons is no longer so very young in Revisited. I look forward to finishing it.

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started this book years ago, but finally finished it this past week, very very glad I did. The comparisons to Catcher in the Rye are imprecise, but there's not really a better way to peg a story seen through the eyes/mind of a seethingly intelligent young man. Simons feels at once older and younger than HC, and is far less of a dipshit, because he knows how much he has to learn about the world and can admit that tenderness. The last 50 or so pages really take off--it turns out you need to read in the world of Edisto for 150 pgs before Powell can demolish it completely. I should confess I worked on getting this book published as an e-book, so I am not completely unstained by commerce here, but cot damn, this book.

Here's a triumphant sentence fragment from the third to last page, about life changes:
"... some new profession, name maybe, no regrets, no losses, no cumbersome ideas of what he is or is to be, no freight train of future ideas bearing down on him, no comet of good old days burning him to a cinder of constantly failing memory."

The gnarled voice can slow you down a bit, and not-a-ton happens in this book, but that's the point, in fact.

update: here is every line i noted in my reading of this book. rare book that really picks up as it goes. the last third is so great.

… everybody in that book (a book Simons read) sounded like these Dobermans I heard about at the Grand. They feed them ashes in their food, which somehow lowers the oxygen in the blood, and when they grow up they don’t believe in anything, except maybe killing, and even the handler has to wear a football suit, more or less, and throw meat to wherever he wants them to go.

[Simons misidentifies condoms]
I found these gold-coin-like deals almost like candy mints, except, thank God, light enough to tip me off before I tried to eat one. Then I thought they were amusement-park tokens or pirate doubloons you buy drinks with in a resort-town bar or something. Then I figured they were gambling chips from the Bahamas, where they’d been on a trip. Gambling chips--I was close.

You can wait to know something like waiting for a dream to surface in the morning, which if you jump up and wonder hard you will never remember, but if you just lie there and listen to the suck-pump chop of the surf and the peppering and the palm thrashing and feel the rising glare of Atlantic heat, you can remember all the things of the night. But if you go around beating the world with questions like a reporter or federal oral history junior sociologist number-two pencil electronic keyout asshole, all the answers will go back into mystery like fiddlers into pluff mud. You just sit down in the marsh and watch mystery peek out and begin to nibble the air and saw and sing and run from hole to hole with itself. Lie down and the fiddlers will come as close to you as trained squirrels in a park. and how did [Taurus] teach me that? I don’t know, but you don’t need a package of peanuts or anything.

Well, a master sets a precedent and it is available for all the trials of posterity. And I am posterity.

tune in one of these weather-farm-fishing shows where the guy sounds like a very young grandfather, and in two hours you know whether to cut tobacco or go fishing or stay in bed, and you have this cozy feeling because a grandfather like that is free, and useful to all of us. He talks about Russians and crime and rain, and his voice never changes
smelling the coast in that gently howling pagoda at 3 A.M.

things like this piled up on me, little nothings that seemed like somethings

seeing Daddy’s car parked a little crooked in the driveway

somehow they would all be insulted if I went about trying to sift action out of what I considered actionless events

Once, thought, [his fighting parents] worked up to the ignition point, and she said, “It’s over. Get out.”
“Hell, it’s my house. You get out.” And beat her to the bedroom. That one tickled me.
But it’s still kind of hard to lie there hearing all this, even though some of it’s funny. Too much of it’s about you, in the third person, when they could just get you in there for your opinion instead of relegating you to misfit. Hell, I would have told them all they needed to know. They’d have both been jaked up if they had asked me. I don’t know how they ever managed to dream that they had an object, like a commodity on a market they had to invest this way or that. And finally, there was a feeling I had that they had quit being themselves in favor of my becoming themselves, as if they were sacrificed to me. They assumed this sacrifice willingly together and only later on discovered that there were two lives being gambled on one.

willing gentlewomen from the low country

Taurus’s girl was shabby where mine was shiny, loose where mine was tight, and I had already taken a heavy fall for her because of those jaw-breaker eyes

nothing to call the bureau of standards and measures about

big wobbly blessing
walking incitement to riot

big, wonderful, warm girls who are just a hint upset about things
I can worry about round, wonderful girls with their edges ruined by life’s little disasters, who remain solid and tough in their drive to feel good--to themselves and to you [slightly icky but it’s in character and feels true to the development of male desire]

I was a reader turning pages written some time ago, discovering what happened next

We go to Savannah, the closest place you can find an Episcopal layout. Right down in the slums, people already holding tallboys and blinking in the rising glare, we hit this pocket of new cars and a cathedral. All the dirt and smoke butts and dead banana trees changes to the soft, stained panes of biblical wonderment; and fresh acolytes with red-and-white robes and white faces and red lips carry gold candles; and the priest puts on twenty sashes and linen underthings and gold-braid overthings until he sweeps when he walks; and gold emerald-studded pikes get carried around, with three prongs for the Trinity; and the people kneel and stand and sing and kneel and pray on red velvet cushions that swing down for your knees like footrests under Greyhound bus sets, but of the finest, heaviest, wood-pegged oak, not bent pot metal; and the sermon intones with catchphrases like “more and more”; and the creeds, Apostle’s and somebody’s, get done; and then we pray, and then we line up for Communion. The Father wipes the silver chalice with a beautiful linen rag large as a small tablecloth, turns the cup two inches each time to keep you from having to drink where the last worshipper lipped it, as if that takes care of the germs. But I don’t care, I always reach out very piously--that’s to say, in slow motion, the way you move for some reason to take and eat the body of Our Savior--reach out and lay my hand over the Father’s in somber reverence to the moment and then press down as the silver rim clears my upper lip and suck a slug of wine that should have fed six communers. I have to, because the bread of His body is stuck to the roof of my mouth like a rubber tire patch, and if I can’t wash it loose by swishing His blood around, I’m going to have to dig it off with a finger, in slow motion, and possibly gag.

She was what they call a good soldier

heavy news

if the good old days were on a respirator, I’d do them the service of going around and pulling the plug

it don’t need no news conference

I took them to fend off the future

Daddy took me outside and said he’d be back, was going into town on “new business.” I caught that odd modifier and noticed he was new. His suit was without wrinkles. Even his skin looked smoother. My idea of him all along was one of these modern store mannequins with stark wood-cut faces always too darkly stained and expressing some dire problem despite the perfect poise with which they model a new suit

a heavy woman carrying on like some folk were cruising for a caning if they didn’t shape up.

And miles become kilometers, shacks condominia, marsh marina, and I feel like one of those bullet-shaped birds in Audubon’s drawer

So don’t get down on your mother if she’s drunk a lot, demanding, promiscuous, imperious, or anything. Because you might be wrong, you might not see the good soldier marching all along down in the trenches, for you. And you might be an igno, after all.

Margaret said some people had regular hopes still

Because once upon a time she was a regular polite heroine in the small-town world of young virgins

engaged to a handsome dude with papers

Here the playwright always turns the screws with something like the girl catching her dude in another man’s arms

It’s like an outcross in dogs or horses. If she’d got that first dude, it would have been severe ideological inbreeding, and I might be shy or vicious or something. This way, the way Vergil tells it anyway (he breeds bird dogs), I can be a “good athlete,” which means not baseball but just a solid individual partaking of two separate strengths and not two compounded weaknesses, I hope

It was that he did not know what his life held and so studied it very closely

then-next
now-next
now-now
without a congenital blessing or a disease

apropos of all this horseshit

roads deliberately curve everywhere when they could go straight

i’ll just watch the photographs yellow

He’d never be so eager to frame and crop the past, because that poses the present--you have to pose it to photograph it. And that means you can’t take the future in its full array of possibility, because you’re fixing to have to compose it for the present snapshot. It’s all square, very square.

It’s like when you watch TV sports with instant replays. You don’t even get caught up in the live play, because if you miss something you just run back in and see the great action you missed--the scenes already past which make the game you never saw so memorable.

no regrets, no losses, no cumbersome ideas of what he is or is to be, no freight train of future bearing down on him, no comet of good old days burning to a cinder of constantly failing memory

So that’s me. This is my motto. Never to forget that, as dully as things get, old as it is, something is happening, happening all the time, and to watch it.

is like living in an architect’s model

now we have furniture that will not make noise

[Faith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a rereading of a classic.

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Probably similar to Harper Lee type story. Too much “this is what it is and I have to accept it” for me.

[Alison Hardtmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edisto Island sits among the other sea islands along the coast of South Carolina, midway between Charleston and Savannah. Both those cities have islands nearer; Tybee for Savannah and John’s and Pawley’s for Charleston. The out-of-staters and affluent go to Myrtle Beach Hilton Head, where there are golf courses, resorts and t-shirt emporiums. This leaves Edisto for families from the Upstate to congregate for their annual beach vacations, in a place where the fancy end of Edisto Beach holds a modest marina, a nine-hole golf course open to the public and a scattering of condos. The rest of the town is composed of beach houses of varying sorts, from the modest and run-down variety to newer three story constructions of wide balconies and cathedral ceilings. There’s a bookstore that features both free wifi and a cat and the local Piggly-Wiggly became a Bi-Lo just last year, although the changes appear to be slight and entirely cosmetic. People buy their vegetables and key lime pies on the drive across the island to the beach, at farm stands down dirt roads or from pick-ups parked along the roadside.

Padgett Powell's novel is set in Edisto before the beach houses were built, when the island had not yet begun it’s transition from a sparsely populated African-American enclave that began as a refuge for escaped slaves, when people made modest livings fishing, farming and weaving grass baskets for the market in Charleston. Twelve-year-old Simons Manigault is being raised out there by his educated and heavy-drinking mother, going to the local school and is an expert in fitting into environments where he is clearly an outsider.

So he goes in the house and reads W.P.A. stories on the walls where the roaches have eaten away the flour but not the ink of the newspapers, and he naps, wakes, and emerges into the old, bored heat of this named but never discovered small place of the South and hears the tin roof tic, tic in that heat.

Simons is a wonderful narrator. He’s clever and observant, but also very much a boy about to enter puberty. Lots of what he sees and experiences he doesn’t fully understand, but he explains as best he can. This is not a book with a lot of action (although things do happen), but one that captures the atmosphere and feel of a world that has been gone for some time, of juke joints and old women fishing, of boxing matches and drunken faculty parties, and of a boy learning about his world and figuring his place in it.

The Father wipes the silver chalice with a beautiful linen rag large as a small tablecloth, turns the cup two inches each time to keep you from having to drink where the last worshipper lipped it, as if that takes care of the germs. But I don’t care, I always reach out very piously — that’s to say, in slow motion, the way you move for some reason to take and eat the body of Our Savior — reach out and lay my hand over the Father’s in somber reverence to the moment and then press down and suck a slug of wine that should have fed six communers. I have to, because the bread of His body is stuck to the roof of my mouth like a rubber tire patch, and if I can’t wash it loose by swishing His blood around, I’m going to have to dig it off with a finger, in slow motion, and possibly gag.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes it behooves one to get to the first thing first, and so I begin by stating outright that EDISTO, Padgett Powell's debut novel, is an outright masterpiece, especially pleasing as such by virtue of the surprise it constitutes not only in being so steadfastly that, but as a result of the fact that this particular reader, only familiar with the author's later works (everything from the marvelous THE INTERROGATIVE MOOD on) could not possibly have foreseen anything close to its unique particularities. Flip this old Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback over, however, and something pertinent is testified to in the lone pair of blurbs you will there discover, extremely complimentary, one from Donald Barthelme (little surprise to readers of later Powell) and one from ... Walker Percy (a surprise, at least, to this reader). Powell has acknowledged the profound influence of Barthelme, whose oft-labeled "postmodern" stories (many) and novels (not so many) are characterized by an abandonment of practical storytelling considerations and of naturalism; they are literary works filled to bursting with things, the English language so drunk on itself it can't hardly stay seated on its stool. Barthelme said he would have written like Beckett if Beckett hadn't already beaten him to it, the legacy of the Irish Francophile having compelled Don B. to pursue a comparatively flamboyant maximalism (which is still a kind of minimalism). Readers of later Padgett Powell will likely be aware of the notable influence of Barthelme and Beckett on his work. Walker Percy, whose groundbreaking 1961 novel THE MOVIEGOER I like very much, was a very different breed of writer, producing edgy works of post-war realism dealing with often painful social, emotional, and psychic transformations. Transformations and spiritual cripplings. Percy is not all that far off from Richard Yates, whose REVOLUTIONARY ROAD was published the same year as THE MOVIEGOER and has in recent times come to be considered an absolutely crucial work in the American canon. The later works of Padgett Powell have nothing to do with that tradition. The fact that the praise for EDISTO from Percy makes just as much sense as the praise from Barthleme goes some way to explaining why the novel was a very pleasantly surprising read for me, providing the wry and ironic sense of experiment I expected with a committed investment in genuine lived experience that caught me slightly off guard (in the best possible way). There is not only wily play with language and form here, but wisdom about life, evidence of observational capacity, fidelity to broader literary traditions, and pathos. Walker Percy was very much a writer of the American South, Barthelme spent much of his life in Huston starting at an early age, and the Powell of EDISTO is also very much a writer of America's lower geographic quarters. EDISTO reminded me in some ways of another masterpiece of Southern literature and firecracker debut novel, Barry Hannah's GERONIMO REX, though EDISTO is more brainy-conceptual and far more streamlined. Both novels are essentially Bildungsromans about young men. The narrator of EDISTO is Simons Everson Manigault, a twelve-year-old boy who we are made to understand is writing the text we are reading under the instructions of his mother, whom he calls the Doctor for the reason that she is a professor with a PhD. We might be inclined to call Simons outrageously precocious, to declare that his wordliness and vocabulary are a kind of parodic flourish, but the whole point here is that he has been raised aggressively on books at the behest of his mother--starting on “all these award children’s books about contemplative rabbits, and llamas that talk and go both ways, which I didn’t know at the time was preparing me for faculty parties,” and ending up at Modern Library etc. (allowing for his periodic demonstration of “Great Books stuntwork”)--which makes possible not only a vocabulary but a partially-developed sensibility suitable to engage the demystifications of childhood in explicitly literary terms. As for the alcoholic, promiscuous mother who no doubt loves him, who wants him to become a writer, known not as the Doctor to the local black population but as the Duchess: “You couldn’t blame her for hedging the progeny gamble.” Not the typical colloquy of a twelve-year-old, no, but profoundly endearing. The bulk of the novel takes place during a period of awakening that happens to coincide with something like an informal trial separation between Simons' parents. Into the picture enters a process server, "pounds of patience," scaring off the maid Theenie, who thinks he's her biracial grandson, and taking over her shack, entreated by the Doctor to companion-up with her son, our narrator, who names the patient man Taurus without the man's protesting. Simons' awakening, facilitated by his brief friendship with Taurus, is not just a matter of becoming hip to the inscrutable business of adults adulting and to sex --“round, wonderful girls with their edges ruined by life’s little disasters, who remain solid and tough in their drive to feel good—to themselves and to you—and offer a vision of snug harbor”--but to matters of personal conduct. This is captured perfectly in a passage which sums a lot up while also presenting perfectly the curious, cock-eyed profundity of Powell's vision: “That’s the thing I learned from him during those days: you can wait to know something like waiting for a dream to surface in the morning, which if you jump up and wonder hard you will never remember, but if you just lie there and listen to the suck-pump chop of the surf and the peppering and the palm thrashing and feel the rising glare of Atlantic heat, you can remember all the things of the night. But if you go around beating the world with questions like a reporter or a federal oral history junior sociologist number-two pencil electronic keyout asshole, all the answers will go back into mystery like fiddlers into pluff mud.” Our narrator is a very eloquent kid indeed, in possession of an expanding understanding that also helps expand the reader's, but he is also able to put on the "Boy Act," and it was not that long ago that he took the Tooth Fairy seriously, or at least pretended to. He is a boy with very clear sight. The thing he understands best are his own limitations, though he is cunning in the application of his assets. If he calls his mother the Doctor, he calls his consistently absent (even when present) father the Progenitor, which we cannot help but assume is a direct reference to Beckett's ENDGAME. Still, the novel is grounded in place and time, speaks very much to pertinent matters born of shared reality. Nixon, Muhammad Ali, and Jim Morrison help tell us where we are in time, and the location of Edisto itself, an estate on the Atlantic Coast, not too far from Savannah, even closer to Charleston, speaks to the South and to Southern literature, with its incandescent strains of eccentricity cultivated in rarefied pockets of relative isolation (think Faulkner). Of course the fact that it is narrated by a twelve-year-old boy not averse to framing the extramarital liaisons of his parents as “paramarital twinings” means that this is a novel of a kind of calculated peculiarity, but it is only such as a means to mine unalterable truths with a singular kind of intelligence not quite available anywhere else. That is no small thing. It is to be prized and heralded. EDISTO is a demonstratively individual novel for which no other could be mistaken, its fingerprints wholly sui generis. “The good old days were on a respirator,” decrees Simons as he envisages the approaching end of a life-altering idyll. We know what it is to lose that summer, that brief tryst, that person who moved on. We begin to grasp the full weight of certain decisive moments, defining periods, in retrospect. We, no matter how learned, are always learning. Sometimes the time that slips through out fingers is spent making art. Sometimes that art is very, very strong. Sometimes this art, forged from finite things, becomes something close to immortal. EDISTO is just such a treasure. Its footwork is Fred Astaire divine. I adore it.

[Al · Rating 2 out of 5]

Padgett Powell is a writer who teaches writing at Florida University--or is he someone who teaches writing at Florida University who decided to write a book? Reading Edisto, I concluded it was the latter. Mr. Powell is a quirky Southern writer, and it feels to me like one day he was teaching Catcher in the Rye to his creative writing class, and he thought to himself, "Hey, I could do this with a Southern boy as the protagonist, and do it better than Salinger anyway!", and Edisto was born. Apparently it made a splash at the time it was published, but it just didn't work for me. I don't care how young the protagonist, Simons Manigault, was when he started to read; no 12 year old could have produced this manuscript. Powell certainly knows his territory, both geographical and social, but the unevenness of the narrative is distracting. Sure, there are times where Simons is a 12 year old, but Powell just can't resist displaying his writing skills by putting sophisticated thoughts and slick sentences into his mouth at every turn. And the plot, or rather the elapsed time of the story, seems kind of pointless other than as a vehicle for showing off his chops. I rate the book as mildly interesting, but not memorable.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was really torn between giving this book three or four stars. I ultimately gave it four because of its strong, thought-provoking ending, which will likely stay with me for some time to come.

I didn't mind that Simons was precocious and actually found his voice and character somewhat convincing. As smart and insightful as he is in some ways, he's definitely childish in others, and not just in his lack of experience in love. His thought process is naïve; he puts ideas together in a way that someone with more knowledge of the world could not.

In other words, Simons is smart, but merely child-smart: his logic is sound, but his often-wrong conclusions reflect a child's lack of depth. Edisto nails the nostalgic feeling a good coming-of-age novel imparts regardless of how different you are from the main character: the way the narrating character thinks brings you back to your own child-mind and the freshness of perception—as well as the breathtaking ignorance—you had way-back-when.

The characters and world of this book are quite vivid. The other thing that edged it into being a four-star book for me was how richly imagined and described it is. I chose this book for a "mini book club" during a family vacation to coastal South Carolina and while it proved not to be the best choice for the purpose—its opaque stream-of-consciousness style put off the other book club members—it was a great way to feel more "in" South Carolina while I was there. Edisto helped me get below the surface of the vacation-resort world I was in for a week and leave with a deeper sense of place for Charleston and coastal South Carolina.

My main problem with this book was my unease with the book's treatment of race and gender. Before I delve further into this objection, I note that I am not one of those readers who dislikes or turns away from a book simply because I find the characters and themes disagreeable. I don't think that every classic book with racist ideas or themes should be discarded because we're more enlightened now; I simply think we need to read such books with a critical mind and reflect both on what they got right and what they got wrong.

Throughout reading Edisto, I struggled with how to deal with its antiquated views of race. Are these purely naturalistic, a reflection of how people truly spoke and thought at a specific time and place? Did the author "fast-forward" childhood memories from the 1950s or early 1960s into an era where they don't quite fit? Or is this simply a matter of the protagonist's age and the particular limitations of his personality?

While Simons essentializes the black people he observes, this could be understood as a product of his unsophisticated child-mind. Most of us are guilty of forming false stereotypes of one sort or another as a children that we ideally unlearn as we grow up. The problem, though, is that the way Simons thinks and talks about race seems so antiquated that I couldn't believe a 1970s kid would think that way: this was ultimately the greatest challenge to my suspension of disbelief.

This novel is set in the Nixon era (1969-1974). It's right at the cusp of when I would find it believable for somewhat educated characters to be referring to black folks as "Negroes." I did some research on the topic and found this article, which reports that the word "started its decline in 1966 and was totally uncouth by the mid-1980s." I suppose then it's not out of the question that a Nixon-era twelve-year-old Southern white boy like Simons would use it casually and neutrally, quasi-scientifically, the way he does. But it really made me feel like I was reading a 1950s-era book rather than a 1970s-era book.

The other, bigger issue is that the most compelling theme of the novel—the struggle to maintain the ability to live in a raw, immediate present, and to resist the development of the calculating adult consciousness that ping-pongs between past and future—is so mixed up in antiquated ideas about race that makes it hard to embrace some of the book's conclusions about life as fully as I would like to embrace them.

To Simons, black adults live in a realer, more sensual world than white adults. This is a classic racist misconception that centers on condescending false ideas about the inherent "simplicity" of an entire race and one that, again, feels like it should have been on its way out by the time period in which the novel is set. Near the end of the book, Simons does show some insight that the social differences he observes have more to do with class than race, but the book rides this premise throughout: the "magical Negro" is the only person capable of evading white upper-class neuroticism.

An easy dodge would be that the twelve-year-old narrator's mind is not only not the author's mind, but that the gaps in Simons' thinking are fodder for the savvy reader to question. It could be argued that the book stands as a subtle condemnation of old-school white Southerners' views of race as something that could only exist in a childish mind. Yet the book resists a totally cynical interpretation, as it makes its readers feel the same longing as Simons to escape the buttoned-up, buttoned-down world of his parents, and convinces us that this must not be the only way adults can be.

Edisto makes us want to believe that what Simons projects on the world is real, that there are at least "some people" who don't become what his literary cousin dubs "phonies." It's just that the savvier among us can't accept Simons' thesis that there is an essential racial difference at work. The sad truth is that the reason we keep writing and reading coming-of-age books, however flawed those books often are, is that most adults are condemned to spend most of their lives longing for a state of being that seems forever shut up in the museum of childhood.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

As far as books about seeing life through a child's eyes go, this is the best one I've read. The main character, Simons Everson Manigault, is a lot more learned than your average child as his mother, called by him the Doctor and by the locals the Duchess, is preparing him to be a famous author one day. He's a young white boy that regularly hangs out at the local juke bar, populated by 1970s black folk.

But he still carries all the same inexperience and innocence as a young boy struggling with his parents's separation. Then a mysterious man without a name - Simons quickly dubs him Taurus - shows up, and he finds a potential father figure or best friend.

This is a slice of life kind of book, one that champions that phrase about the specific being universal, that can leave you looking at a lot of little things in a different way. Powell's distinctive language, meandering but always poignant, sets it apart and makes it shine.

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edisto is a coming of age story that draws a lot from Salinger in the voice of its intelligent, prickly protagonist. But Powell's interest in language is what really separates him from the Salinger wannabes. In his more recent works, Powell plays a lot with the form of the novel. Mrs. Hollinghurst's Men only almost-barely had a plot. Edisto, like Mrs. Hollinghurst's Men, has a first person narration – voluble, rambling – but the narrative stays firmly fixed in reality. Since we're in Simon's head for the entire novel, it's lucky for the reader that he's a perceptive kid, wrestling with large issues that have long haunted the South. He feels around the intersections of race and class in his South Carolina hometown as only a teenager would, since adults have already made their peace with the status quo.

[Katherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book came from a list in the Wall Street Journal of best books about the south. It is the story of one summer in the life of an extremely bright, literate, 12 year old boy on the South Carolina coast. His parents are separated, his Mother seems completely negilent other than to surround him from birth with all the great works of literature. Seemingly out of nowhere a black man appears and is instantly installed as his substitute father figure. The two bond and adventure through the summer. Unfortunatley, I found Simons Everson Manigault (the boy's name) language so complex, flowery and obscure as to be distracting. Probably worth another read sometime to see what I missed.

Has anyone else read this??

[wally · Rating 5 out of 5]

my copy was signed by padgett at goehring's on 13th street, april 14th 1985. i guess this was padgett's m.f.a. at the university of houston, coached by donald barthelmew...i spell that right?

simons everson manigault, "a rare one-m simons", a kind of updated huck finn and all the characters in his life..."life is a time when you get pleasure until somebody get your ass. and one of the ways to prolong pleasure is to not chop up time with syllables." the boys at the baby grand...maybe kidd rock read this story?

don't believe he used once the n-word. had he, i'm certain someones would have counted...who knows, been awhile since i read this one. padgett has fun w/language and that is entertaining to read.

[Philipp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dry and funny. 12-yr-old protagonist/narrator, so things pass him by, but only barely, and he is amazingly honest about lying to himself (or denying some truths).
Just a fun read.
And, I'm not sure if this counts as a spoiler, since it doesn't give away any of the plot, but here is a culmination of sorts.
"I was, I am - I have to admit, that because my life is cloyed by practical plans and attainable hopes - I am white. Best thing to do, I figure, is to get on with it. [...] I had one of these white hearts that lub-dub this way: then-next; and Taurus had one of these that go now-next; and the guys at the Grand went now-now. And you can't change that with decisions to be cool. You can't get to that now-now without a congenital blessing or disease, whichever applies."

[Susan Swartwout · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surprising and superlative coming of age story combined with wonderful descriptions of Southern life. Simons, a young writer-in-training by his professor mother whom he calls The Doctpr, is mature beyond his years and sports an impressive vocabulary and viewpoint of the world. His sexual naiveté, explored through the lens of his otherwise worldly eyes, is humorous, charming, and often blunt. The plot is not a page turner, but the reactions of Simons to his parents' separation and ongoing battles, as well as his sardonic comments about the adults in his life and their behavior, make the book riveting.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm struggling with a response to "Edisto." On one hand, Powell's prose is inimitable. The entire book is highly stylized. I'm fascinated by literary family trees and forebears, and I think a lot of contemporary American fiction sprang from either Hemingway or Faulkner (undoubtedly not a novel theory). Powell is obviously a Faulkner-ite, and "Edisto" could in many ways be considered a modern update of a Faulkner novel, primarily in how it treats white people and the African-Americans who live alongside them, along with its byzantine sentences. Powell attempts to capture the speech of each group as closely as Faulkner did and throw us into the scene with very little commentary. With both writers, this means you must pay close attention to what you're reading, and even then I think you're only going to capture eighty or ninety percent of what's going on. The worlds of the deep South described by Faulkner and Powell are somewhat inaccessible, at least to a Northerner like me. It's interesting that both Faulkner and Hemingway, despite the huge differences in style, were both operating under the iceberg premise, where the most important parts of the book may be those submerged sections left unwritten. Powell is doing the same here. The difference for me, however, was that threading through Faulkner's books were deep questions about the Civil War, reconstruction, the Southern economy, and racism. I didn't get that same feeling of weightiness from "Edisto." Here comes the "on the other hand" part of my review. I didn't feel like a whole lot of consequence "happened" in Powell's book. This is the problem I've had with certain other Southern fiction. Take Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer," for instance: as beautiful as Percy's sentences are, I felt that book simply included a lot of wandering around and observing stuff. (I don't think "The Moviegoer" is Percy's best book.) "Edisto" was similar to other novels by contemporary white Southern writers where a privileged white child learns valuable life lessons from a black caregiver while coming of age. I'm not sure what to make of this, but it seems to hold true in "To Kill a Mockingbird," Ellen Gilchrist's Rhoda stories, etc. The African-Americans, though depicted as uneducated and unmotivated, have a certain common sense wisdom that I find patronizing. "Edisto" is told from the point of view of Simons, the twelve year-old child of a lawyer and college professor living in South Carolina. The parents are separated, and neither spends much time working. For whatever reason, none of the characters in "Edisto" go by their actual names aside from Simons. His father becomes "The Progenitor" while his mom becomes "The Doctor." Early in the book, a black man shows up to serve a warrant on the daughter of the family's housekeeper. The process server, whom Simons christens "Taurus" (we never learn the man's real name), ends up sticking around to babysit Simons at The Doctor's request. Why would he agree to this? Simons, at age 12, can't quite figure it out, though the reader can; The Doctor is an attractive woman living alone. What we get from there on out are set pieces of mullet fishing, hanging out at a juke joint called The Baby Grand, going to a prize fight, and visiting a market in Charleston. The Progenitor makes sporadic, jealous appearances. The Doctor hosts a drunken faculty party. Simons gradually grows up and learns about sex and about all the things he thinks he knows but doesn't. "Edisto" is worth studying for Powell's obvious verbal wit, but I wonder if it would only truly make sense to a reader from a geographic perspective. Ultimately I found Powell to be quite similar, stylistically, to Barry Hannah, but without Hannah's humor or outrageousness. Which finally brings me back around to the question of race in "Edisto." I don't think Powell has any duty as a novelist to do more than acknowledge the state of black and white people in the South, their coexistence, as he does here. Yet there was something distasteful about the treatment of African-Americans in the book, how they simply accede to the demands of whites without question. At one point they literally serve as living anthropologic exhibits for whites to view. Powell also throws in some distasteful comments about "Arabs" and mentally handicapped people here and there. Overall I took the tone to be that there's an educated white overclass in the South, and this position is fine and shouldn't be questioned. It was almost as though the question of racism was being answered as "race relations are fine because we live among black people and they give us their valuable homespun wisdom, and in return we throw some cash at them from time to time and let them work as our servants." There's no history tossed in to explain how this came about, and no reflection of whether it's right or not. Taurus teaches Simons some things, but at the end of the book Taurus goes to New Orleans, presumably to keep serving papers?, while Simons's parents get back together and move to Hilton Head, Simons switches from public to private school and takes up tennis and golf lessons. Does Powell see this as a defeat for Simons, or a victory? The change that occurs in "Edisto" is merely a reversion to form. The characters can't escape the loop? Or they don't want to? At any rate, I was troubled by the content and theme of "Edisto," but I think it's important to read books like this that challenge our viewpoints, and Powell is worth reading for his obvious talents as a stylist and observer.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

An endearingly quirky book. 12-year old Simons Manigault is both preternaturally wise and childishly innocent. The passages in which he attempts to learn about sex are hilarious. Of his first "date"--"It didn't turn out so marvelous. It's like waterskiing, which is no fun until you know what you're doing. Same with kissing, etc."
It's easy to miss things in this short book--I started re-reading it from the beginning when I finished.

[Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't get this story. It's about a very smart 12 year old boy who lives in the low country with his strange mother. It's summer and he visits his father. Didn't care for it.

[Sylvia Swann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simons Manigault, what a glorious little fellow. And this, sweet, brilliant book allows us a glimpse at his life. Bravo Padgett Powell.

[Gabrielle · Rating 1 out of 5]

Could not get in to it. The highlight was the setting.