Seed: A Novel

by Stanley Crawford

Seed  is the story of Bill Starr’s final days. Childless but with a lifetime’s worth of possessions and a nearly infinite web of extended family, Bill endeavors to empty his house completely before he dies by summoning distant relatives to claim their inheritance. Many of his letters go unanswered, but those who do appear show up only to find that their reward is often much less valuable than they might expect.
 
What they get instead are Bill’s memories, made vivid by each item from the past, memories that are more exotic and curious than the lives currently lived by his young relatives.
 
Accompanied by his housekeeper, Ramona, and his young gardener, Jonathan, Bill is a somewhat cantankerous, wildly intelligent, and often forgetful man who recalls and speaks to his passed wife, often thinking that she's not dead. His unwillingness to recognize what has happened to her and to give away his only possession of any value, a 1937 Pierce-Arrow automobile that they bought together, becomes the measure of his grief and of his love in this profoundly funny novel that faces death and love sincerely.

Genres: Novels

192 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2015

About the author

Crawford is the author of "Gascoyne," "Petroleum Man," "Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine," "A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm," "Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico," "The River in Winter," and "Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage and to my Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of their Childhood." He lives in new Mexico with his wife, RoseMary, where they own and run a garlic farm.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

A new Stanley Crawford novel is an event, celebrated in my neighbourhood with all-night raves and intense cheese-and-nibbles comedowns around 4am. His previous novel, the tender satire (this phrase perhaps defines his oeuvre) Petroleum Man, explored the trickledown effect of laissez-faire capitalism on the family, and in Seed, Crawford once again deals with material things and their impact upon the soul. Bill Starr is spending his twilight alone, following the loss of his wife some time earlier, with his nagging Mexican carer who hopes to inherit the possessions her boss has started auctioning off to his remaining relations. Having summoned his relatives to claim their inheritances, Bill bumbles around his house welcoming his thrice-removed nephews and nieces, misremembering their names every few minutes, having secret erotic thoughts he hopes he never expresses, and offering them random possessions, including a 1937 convertible to a married couple, which has a deleterious impact on their relationship. This novel is a warm and melancholic rumination on ageing and the eventual worthlessness of a life’s amassed possessions when knocking on heaven’s door.

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stanley Crawford's SEED (FC2) is a remarkable novel, where intertextual references (to Shakespeare, largely, but also to Eliot, Thoreau, and others) and inter-textural resonances (of Faulkner, Woolf, James, and Joyce) abound. Like Caliban, its narrator, who's "gone to seed," both literally and metaphorically, resides in a place "full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs," navigating within and around life's interstices with delight, doubt, and some rancor. It's a comic novel, albeit one that revels in an engagingly peculiar gallows humor. For anyone who enjoys dense and lyrical lexical fields, narratological displacements, and comic exchanges that upend false certainties and social proprieties, this one's for you.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book I've read that reminds me of Mopus by Oisin Curran, one of my favorite books that no one has ever heard of. Also of Tinkers. Definitely for fans of prose over plot. Humorous, unreliable narrator but only in that memory is unreliable. Good also for reading right before bed... Not sure what else to say, but I really enjoyed this. Thanks to Martin Riker for initially introducing me to Crawford's writing, and for Ken Baumann for mentioning this new book on social media -- I wouldn't have found it otherwise.

[Alexa "Naps" Snow · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Seed" is somewhat a passive aggressive, dark humored, cynic story told by old age- young spirited man. One of those who let you look back without anger or regrets.

[Mary]

Mr. Starr is attempting to give away all of his things before he dies. Trouble is, those things, for the most part, come back to him.
He ruminates on life and death. In the end he is just a watcher.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bill Starr, the protagonist of Stanley Crawford's new work, is mellower than those of his earlier books, like Some Instructions and Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine, but he retains his irascibility and willful opaqueness—and that's a good thing. Crawford continues his struggle with the opposed demons of materialism and self-sufficiency to the point of reclusiveness.

Starr is dying, and most of the action of the novel consists of his efforts to fling his possessions away, to family members if possible, to just about anyone if necessary.

Constructed from brief, wry episodes, the book is surprisingly cinematic, in the sense that it's easy to visualize, and that's due to the clearly drawn characters of Starr and his housekeeper Ramona. Crawford doesn't use quotation marks to set off discourse, and Starr is prone to relate both his inner monologue and what he actually utters, blurred together in one paragraph. This trick works to good comic effect.

Water is a preoccupations of Crawford's (see his Mayordomo), and sex preoccupies us all: the two come together in a quite lyrical, dreamy passage at pp. 116-117. And then there is:

Life, a trough, urges us like fish down the flow into ever narrower passages, selecting, winnowing toward individuation and singularity, and then with one fell swoop takes it all away, sooner or later, leaving our inert residues to live, figuratively to live, to live on. (p. 29)

And this epigram:

Water, cold and hot, we are mostly made of, ninety percent. The rest of what we're made of is money. And some minerals. (p. 13)

[in8 · Rating 4 out of 5]

engaged w/ it in Colorado: http://www.5cense.com/15/449.htm

[Sharry Teague]

Interesting.