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fortysomething
| Article
# : |
19677 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
1,938 Words |
| Author
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Gail Regier
Gail Regier teaches creative writing at the University of
Central Florida in Orlando, and writes frequently for
Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, and the American Scholar. |
This novel is a benchmark for several current trends. It represents one type of the new academic novel, which focuses less on the coming of age of students and more on the midlife adjustments of their professors. It represents recent attitudes toward the 1960s, managing to be both critical and sentimental toward that restless era. And it is in the joyful style of the new southern fiction, whose authors are eager to distance themselves from the pessimism of such writers as William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams.
Those are three good reasons to read Philip Lee Williams' Perfect Timing. Another is that it is very funny. For Clayton, a fortyish professor of music, sees his old college girlfriend, Camille Malone, on a TV documentary about the homeless, and drops everything to go rescue her. It's a quixotic quest, full of comic surprises, not the least of which is the time when "shrimpers with arms like Popeye got into a fight with the preachers." Along the way, Ford acquires his Sancho Panza: his cousin Clarence, a ne'er-do-well who got religion while serving time for robbery. Clarence has the generic features of a southern gothic character: the country malapropisms, the fundamentalism, the decayed aristocratic bloodline. But all of these are played for laughs. "Hostile not thyself towardeth me," he tells Ford. Clarence maintains that Jesus was a country singer and ponders what kind of fish He used to feed the multitudes. "My money's on catfish," he decides.
A piano prodigy, Camille organized her college's first antiwar march and founded the Malone Society (named after herself), a "Philosophico-Musico-Politico" discussion group in which she does all the discussing. Some looked down on her as the campus tramp, but Ford worshiped her for her talent, beauty, and prodigious (if mostly incomprehensible) learning. In their first meeting, he watches "the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen play the concert grand on stage." As she finishes playing, Ford's eyes fill with tears. "I may never get over that," he says. She answers, "Nobody ever gets over Camille Malone."
Camille turns Ford's search for her into an elaborate game of hide-and-seek involving secret messages, a palm reader, and a dwarf hotelkeeper. But the quest brings Ford to terms with the ghosts and fantasies of his youth. By the end of the novel he has begun to find a contentment that has always eluded him.
The new academic novel
The traditional academic novel is a satire of the
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