Charley Bland [Hardcover]

Mary Lee Settle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1989

In this moving and brilliant narrative of doomed love, Mary Lee Settle tells a triangular affair set in the small town of Canona, West Virginia. The novel's narrator, a thirty-five-year-old widow and writer, returns from a self-imposed European exile to find her hometown much as she left it decades ago.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With its zinger of an opening sentence: "It seemed that when I was growing up, all the wild roads led to Charley Bland," Settle sweeps into her seductive story, a memento of a lost love and a genteelly devouring way of life. In 1960, widowed and a fledgling author, the 35-year-old narrator returns home to West Virginia, where she becomes the newest conquest of the town rake and alcoholic, irresistible Charley Bland. Both are prodigals and sinners: she in having fled the South to live the bohemian life in Paris, Charley thoroughly in thrall to his ruthless, implacably selfish mother: "She used charm like a blunt instrument." The passionate summer romance cools to a secret relationship that endures for seven years. Finally, the narrator feels she has received "permission to leave" from those who have known from the beginning that Charley will never marry her. A familiar story, perhaps, but Settle recounts it in beautifully cadenced, lyrical prose, her elegiac tone perfectly sustained, her ironic insights stinging with her special understanding of how Southern codes of conduct, especially the ironclad traditions of family relationships, foreordain the tragic waste of lives. Settle, whose Beulah Quintet has few peers in its depiction of Southern character, makes this bittersweet love story resonant with the truths of life.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Having fled the suffocating small-town environment of her West Virginia home and re-created herself as a writer in post-war Paris, the heroine of this condensed, lyric novel returns to discover that having dreams come true is sometimes disastrous. For there she again meets Charley Bland, the golden boy she worshiped as a child, now the town's most eligible--and elusive--bachelor. It was, she comments, "a dangerous meeting. Each of us had lived too long in the other's fantasy. . . . A safety he didn't have drew me. A glamour I no longer considered drew him." The affair they begin quickly demolishes everything this woman had made of herself in the years she had been away. In language delicate, pungent, and redolent of meaning as pressed flowers, Settle show us that the past, however illusory, has extraordinary power. A novel perhaps short on plot but long on atmosphere and understanding of the human heart. Highly recommended.
- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T); 1st Trade edition (November 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374120781
• ISBN-13: 978-0374120788
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,126,297 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is breathtaking!, July 6, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Charley Bland (Paperback)

I loved this book so much that I was moved to come on here and tell you all about it. I had always heard of Mary Lee Settle, but had never read her work. I picked this book up in a used bookstore and feel so thankful that I did. Her writing is gorgeous, mesmerizing, full of truths and observations that we all see, but so few can articulate. It's a slender novel and yet rich with detail so you end up feeling like it's much longer than it is. Settle represents this entire community and culture so well that you feel like you know these people, and the love story at the center of the novel is utterly timeless. The book is romantic and heartbreaking and painful not in the popular "pink roses" sense of romance, but so much like the way many have lived romantic love....aching and bittersweet and complicated. I am a writer and an avid reader and this book knocked me out in a way that so few do. Highly recommended. I plan to read all of her other books now.