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This novel takes place on the Mississippi
Gulf Coast after the destruction caused by
Hurricane Camille in 1969. It deals with the
theme of resurrection and return after disaster,
as reflecting also in the lives of the main characters.
The major character is an aging man, Arnold
Carrington, who was once a leading professor
at a nearby university, but was dismissed because
of the activist role he took in the campus revolts
of the ’60s. Retiring to the Coast to study and
write, he soon faced his wife’s death from cancer
and the hurricane’s wreckage. His present
ambition is to restore. Restore the coast to
some semblance of its pre-hurricane beauty
and restore his own shattered self-image. This
goal involves him with a number of different
souls, also to some extent derelict—a young
woman, Mavis Henley, who has followed Frank
Matteo, a restaurant owner with Mafia connections.
She has lost his child and is estranged from him
at that time. Other characters include an avenging
ex-colleague at the university, Lex Graham, his
wife (with whom Carrington has once had an affair)
and daughter. Lex’s hatred of Carrington forces
a good many conflicting forces into play. He becomes
a sort of pursuing nemesis, bent on accomplishing
any possible damage. Carrington, perhaps through
a native sense of life’s great and various possibilities,
is never to be turned over to utter defeat, and gradually,
using whatever comes to hand, he begins to find
his way out to a new life—both for himself, for the
damaged locale, and for those who are given enough
vision to follow him.
The book was in Penguin’s Contemporary American
Fiction series for a number of years. I think of it as one of my
most successful novels. It is now in print at
Louisiana
State University Press.
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