Polar

In Polar, Deputy Ray Tatum has two mysteries to solve: the disappearance of Angela Dunn, a wordless child who wanders into the woods, never to be seen again by her parents, and the sudden prophetic powers of the formerly worthless Clayton, a shiftless town institution best known for his preference for the porn channel. One mystery will be solved, while the other remains tantalizingly out of reach. But these strong narrative engines are not what really drives Polar, T. R. Pearson's latest novel. What Pearson seeks to do, instead, is capture the feel of small town life and the myriad personalities that give it texture, without resorting to the usual platitudes that pretend such towns have more than their share of unspoiled innocence. In other words, Pearson's small-town Virginia is no Mayberry. Nor is it inhabited by the Cleavers. The novelist thinks nothing of interrupting the flow of his narrative to give the life story of a minor character who may never appear in the book again. This doesn't constitute an aesthetic flaw. After all, the true, unvarnished motivations of man are what Polar is really all about. It's about characters like Ivy Vaughn, a woman who remains in such a high dudgeon she never pays attention to the road and leaves a trail of dead animals in her wake. It's also about Mrs. Dunn, who turns the loss of her daughter and husband into profit, launching a career as a radio celebrity whose collective losses make her an authority on flagging American morals. And, of course, there is Clayton, whose television satellite is arced over his garage at an angle that betrays, for all to observe, his addiction to televised erotica. Clayton seems an unlikely candidate to be blessed with the gift of second sight. But fate, which has a definite sense of humor in a T.R. Pearson novel, chooses Clayton to become a small-time, small-town prophet. Only Deputy Tatum is able to turn Clayton's obscure prognostications to good purpose in his search for Angela. Motivated by the haunting memory of his own dead child, Ray pursues Angela's story long after the media, the FBI and even the girl's parents have given her up for lost. Using the prism of Tatum's grief, Pearson critiques small-town pretensions and, by extension, America's chronic hypocrisies.

On the surface this is a kind of mystery/disappearance/whodunit kind of book. But folks that's the surface. On every other level it is a wonderful but eccentric biography of a place, a small town somewhere in the Blue Ridge, and what it feels like to live there...the humorous eccentrics, the odd kind of loneliness and loss the landscape evokes, the fundamental decency of most folks (including the eccentrics) and the threatening shallowness of strangers from outside. The place, the characters, and the feelings all point in the same direction. I like that! If you prefer straightforward thrillers this will be new to you, but give it a try. If you prefer your local-color novels to be relatively plotless, this will be far too interesting for your tastes!

Imagine my surprise--sitting in the waiting room at the Ford dealership while the 40,000 mile service was being completed, I'd brought along T R Pearson's Polar to finish. I assumed that I'd be chuckling aloud at Clayton the backwoods seer and Ray Tatum, the deputy we'd met in Blue Ridge. But Pearson caught me off guard, and there I was all misty eyed in the waiting room. He's not a writer who plays to sentiment at all--in fact, he's just the opposite. He's swinging the satirist's sharp blade most of the time, so that the uplands of Western Virginia become a cultural cross-section of contemporary America. There's humor in his slicing and some exasperation as well. But this is a novel about the tiny dollops of redemption that most of us have to make do with in this life, and when he's brought us to that realization, Pearson's one of the most affecting and effective writers going today. Polar continues the trend he established in Blue Ridge--a pared back style, a harder edge to his criticism--but this one has called for an emotional investment from the writer that he's held back for a while. He's worth every minute--read him.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. (William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "Hamlet", Act 1 scene 5) And some of those dreams are centered in rural Virginia. Okay - some of the dialect comes on a little too thick - especially at the begining - but I liked this story a lot. This one helped get me through a "weather delay" at a great metropolitan airport, and then some. The main character, Clayton, tells people to call him Titus and then starts predicting the future. Not those great big tabloid future predictions, it is just that he seems to know the "sort of stuff he's got no cause to know." Like drawing an accurate map of Antartica on his chimney. Then there is an unsolved disappearance of a child three years ago that Clayton/Titus seems to know something about. Well, you take that and wrap it with some other rather quirky characters and you get a rather good redneck stew of a novel/mystery/whatever. I enjoyed it and I look forward to more from T.R. Pearson.

This follows the place and characters from Pearson's Blue Ridge.Wonderfully whimsical, full of fascinating small-town events andpeople. There's a mystery here, but that's just one thread--ifyou're looking for John Grisham or Mickey Spillane or AgathaChristie, this isn't for you. No kidnapping of the president'sdaughter by terrorists or other national perils, but rather amissing child and small-town crimes such as pilfered fruit. Thisis a book that cannot be hurried through--if you've ever sat downwith the locals at the small-town general store or sewing circleand listened to the tales and gossip for several hours, you'llhave an appreciation for the writing style. Unlike life in a city, you're known by your family and relatives by marriage andthe like--one of the Smythville Jeeters whose daughter marriedthe oldest Bynum boy from Wartburg, the one who drives the UPS truck. So a thread will start up, and that will occasion somecomments about so-and-so's family, and that leads into anotherthread of talk, and a further thread--eventually getting back tothe first thread where some progress is made before wandering offagain to other threads. When you listen to the locals at thegeneral store/sewing circle, they want to know where a person isfrom, who their cousins are, where they work, etc. This could beinsufferably boring, but the threads that Pearson follows in hisbooks take you to a tapestry of foibles and eccentricities thatare fascinating. This is certainly the funniest new book I'veread in a couple of years, and one I'm already looking forward torereading, even though I just finished it two hours ago.