Edisto by Padgett Powell is a short, strange coming-of-age novel from the American South. It is immediately singular and disorienting, and the reader is forced to accept each sentence, each paragraph, one after another until a hazy picture begins to emerge. It never fully does. That's a strength, overall. Powell is a writer's writer: my edition boasts cover blurbs from Donald Barthelme, Walker Percy, and even Saul Bellow. Trying to make sense of it, I was reminded of Joy Williams's The Quick and the Dead, in that the narrator and characters existed in a weird backwater of rural customs and bizarre syntax.
Even with some distance from reading it, I don't know what to make of Edisto. It was funny, often. The events rarely made sense. I think I liked the book . . . and I haven't hurried to read more Padgett Powell. To enter that world again will require a rare, mysterious inclination. Maybe in a decade or two.
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