Flying Shoes, the rambling, delicious first novel from Lisa Howorth (co-founder of the iconic Square Books in Oxford, Miss.), parses a chaotic week in the life of Mary Byrd Thornton, the scatterbrained wife of gallery owner Charles and mother of 11-year-old Eliza and eight-year-old William. Unsettled by a cold call from a Richmond, Va., police detective wanting to reopen the decades-old unsolved murder of Mary Byrd's nine-year-old step-brother, she must revisit that life-changing family event just as a freak ice storm rattles through her bucolic Mississippi college town. Planes are grounded, roads are slick with black ice, Charles is late returning from a business trip, and her would-be lover and would-be novelist friend Jack Ernest campaigns for her to meet him at a local bar featuring the doo-wop Velvatones. Her handyman, Tolliver "Teever" Barr, is too hopped up to drive the icy roads, so her only safe ride to Richmond is with a long-haul trucker dispatched by Mary Byrd's always reliable gay friend Hubard Mann Valentine, Jr. (Charles's prep-school roommate, current CEO of a thriving chicken business).
This may sound like the makings of some kind of Southern gothic nightmare, and in many ways it is. However, in Howorth's able hands, it is more Barry Hannah than Larry Brown--more funny, character-driven storytelling with crackling dialogue than whiskey-fueled violence and mayhem. She gets Charles and Mary Byrd down cold: "their union was long and without major trauma... he made things work... it was all sort of like lighting the grill or making coffee." But Howorth also has a keen ear for Teever's earthy vernacular ("I'm like a worm in hot ashes; I got to keep movin'") or for the carousing Jack's cynicism (a coed date "bored him to death with her graduate student babble about Derrida, deconstruction, postmodernism, all that shit").
The title comes both from a Townes Van Zandt song and from young William's fascination with the winged sandals of mythology's Mercury--"if you didn't like something, or something bad happened, you would just fly away." But Mary Byrd knows better: you can't fly away from your troubles, your family tree or your Delta roots. She reflects: "The world was a crazy, round place. There weren't any neat, even lines to make things clear, or corners to hide in... everybody just had to hang on for dear life, hoping the ride wouldn't be too centrifugal, or too bumpy, or more than one could stand." Lisa Howorth's Flying Shoes is itself a helluva ride--a skeptical, funny, always-compassionate trip through a small-town Southern universe. --Bruce Jacobs
Shelf Talker: Bookseller Howorth's funny, compassionate first novel tracks a week in the small-town Mississippi life of a woman confronting a 30-year-old family tragedy.