Customer Reviews

Down Town

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Ferrol Sams knows his readers. After a rather lengthly hiatus he returns with a novel about a "fictional" Georgia town. Anyone who lives in the South knows the characters in this book. If you are unfamiliar with Dr. Sams I would suggest reading Run With the Horseman as a primer. This novel is filled with a timeline of the populace of a hamlet filled with true Southern characters. I read several passages to my wife who comes from a small south Georgia community, and we agreed we knew the "real" names of these folks.
My only two concern with this is that there are so many people that it sometimes gets a little confusing. Secondly, some people who are not from Georgia may not catch all the Georgia references (Cobb County, Stone Mountain, Woodward Academy, Piedmont Hospital, etc.)
All in all a great book about small Georgia and the South. Congratulations Dr. Sams on your recent retirement. We have missed you, Sambo. Welcome back.

Dr. Sams recently appeared at the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta and after listening to him speak, I realized that his books are simply a method to get out all his stories that he has had related to him over the decades (or experienced first hand). The plot line of "Down Town" is minimal at best but involves the somewhat obscured doings in Fayetteville, a town south of Atlanta now being swallowed up by the greater megaplex. At age 85, Dr. Sams gets to tell those last stories that may have gotten him into deeper hot water when he was younger and get in a few digs at the current state of local and national affairs. You can imagine him telling you to grab your sweet tea and sit in the glider on the front porch, he has a few tales to tell you about the neighbors over the course of a late afternoon sliding into the dark.

For all you folks that still can't figure out us Southerners and want to learn about maiden aunts, family relations based on four or five generations of history and small town life, this would be a good start. Just be patient with the story line-you wouldn't interrupt your grandfather when he takes a detour, asking him for the Reader's Digest condensed version of his tale. Dr. Sams will weave all the bits and pieces into a fine, rich fable.

This is the story of the eccentric characters in a small Ga. town south of Atlanta and is narrated by an older gentleman who has observed several generations of this small town. He is recounting his personal accounts and perspective of a prominent family in the town for a new acquaintance who has a mysterious tie to the town. It is full of entertaining stories of these folks, but if you don't read carefully, some of the relationships or the subtle humor will slip right by. Many of the stories will make you laugh out loud and read them aloud to whoever is nearby. The only thing I can imagine to be more pleasant than reading these stories is to hear them told in Dr. Sams' own voice. This is a book that should be read more than once!

Another outstanding effort by the best Southern Writer of our time. He writes about the South as it is and its people as they are, with a loving, understanding, sometimes biting, touch. Ferrol Sams, a man of emphathy, is a gifted observer of humanity and our Southern idiosyncrasies

Those of us who grew up in small Southern towns know the people he writes about. The are our friends, neighbors, relatives and sometimes "they" are us. Ferrol Sams writes about humanity in the South with an uncommon human touch.

Like Viola Goode Liddell, he writes about a proud people in need of much but who deny the need of anything. And he makes them come alive, sitting in the room with you, on the porch with you or walking by outside on the street. This man is a gift to those of us who grew up in the South and to those who long to know what it was/is like to grow up here. This man is one of us and he "explains" us well, sometimes too well.

This book lacks some of the "snap, crackle and pop" of the Sambo (Porter Osborne) stories, but it is still a great and essential read for Southerners and for those intrigued by them (us).

Sams' novel is reminiscent of T.R. Pearson's masterpiece "A Short History of a Small Place". Both novels feature narrators who describe events in their towns: Pearson's narrator is a young boy, Sams' is an elderly lawyer. Neely, North Carolina, Pearson's town in A Short History, remains a backwater, Sams' town (I cannot remember seeing the name mentioned) is not far from Atlanta, and grows into a commuter suburb. So part of the pleasure in Sams' novel is seeing the growing pains, the Wal-Marts, the influx of outsiders. For a long time the town's roads were dirt--and one of the reasons for this was to make it more inconvenient for any strangers who might come by.

You need to be patient with this book (you need to be VERY patient with Pearson's novel). If you've ever lived in small towns you'll quickly see why. Both novels ramble--a subject gets mentioned, and this leads to another subject, and a third and fourth subject, eventually getting back to the first. Imagine sitting on a bench in a small-town general store and listening to the locals talk. It'll start with Bob's cousin Ella Mae, the one who married the UPS driver Joe Allen, from over on the Wartburg Road, one of the east side Allens. This will lead to discussion about the Allen clan and how Old Man Allen caught Billy Smith stealing eggs last week.After some opinions about the Smith family morals, especially the eldest girl Mary Jo, maybe we get back to the original Ella Mae story again, before diverting once more. As I said, you have to be patient. You do not interrupt the local who is describing Mary Jo's less wholesome habits and say "Enough. Please get back to the Ella Mae story!". So the book does a very nice job capturing small-town mannerisms.

In both novels, much of the enjoyment centers of the eccentricities of the locals. You need a good writer (and an interesting narrator) to make this work successfully. For Sams, the writing style is something of a change from his great trilogy, but the change works well. A most enjoyable book, and if you are not familiar with T.R. Pearson's trilogy- especially Short History--you should read that also!

My husband has read all of Ferrol's books and has laughed his way thru all of them. Growing up in the south in the country during the 40's and 50's gives you a total appreciation of these books. He convinced me to read Down Town and I laughed all the way thru. My husband is a rather somber person, but Mr. Sams has given him many laughs and hours of pleasure. This book lets you put names of characters in the book with real people in the small towns and country where we grew up. If you love reading about characters in the south when times were simple and neighbors still knew and helped one another, this book is for you. I will read all of his books after reading this one.

When Major Cofield arrived in our town, sometime after the War Between The States, he was the first of an illustrious dynasty--of quirky characters. As time went on they founded a banking empire, ran the Bazemores out of business, gained and lost political power, and ended up with--well, you just have to read the story. A story without a real plot, but packed full of colorful, often dyspeptic personalities, petty conflicts, social indiscretions, and, inevitably, change.

The story is told by Aloysius (or Buster) Holcombe, an eccentric bachelor attorney, who is no relation to the Cofields but knows everything about them (and everyone else in town). A man who loves to quote poetry, especially Edna St. Vincent Millay, and who, in his youth found her poetry a great key to seduction. Ah, but those were different times.

Author Ferrol Sams is a great writer, with a flair for comic narrative, regional speech, and the ebb and flow of cultural history. And, of course, poetry. At times he will have you roaring with laughter. Unfortunately, the book sometimes drags a bit, and I found it hard to keep up with all the dozens of characters. Still, if the history of small Southern towns interests you at all, you will undoubtedly enjoy Down Town. I recommend it highly. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

Typical Sams. I can't read Ferroll Sams and not smile the whole time. This one is no exception. His characters are so quirky that they ~have~ to live somewhere, probably around Fayetteville, where Sams lives. Like his Run with the Horsemen, while he may deny that it's autobiographical, I find that hard to believe. Granted he's not a lawyer--a good thing--as is the owner of the eyes through which the story is seen (he's a doctor in real life), that doesn't make a lot of difference in the narrative, when you come down to it.

It's vintage Ferroll Sams. If you like his other work, you'll like this. If not, prolly won't, but then you wouldn't be reading this review if that were the case. Don't miss Beatrice's speech quirks. They're the best. It was occasionally like reading Molly Bloom's rambling thoughts.

I had the honor of listening to and then talking to Dr Sams at an AAFP meeting in Kansas City 10 years ago. I had read all of his works. He is one of those authors whose 'voice' you can hear as your read his writings. He has been a family doctor in a small southern town for many years; his observations of humanity cannot be surpassed.

My wife read this book and told me that it was unusual. Unlike so many books, it has a very weak plot (if any).
But also unlike so many books, it has a fantastic ending. Many authors have a great "idea" and then lose their way and fail at the conclusion. Dr Sams is just the opposite. His ending in this book is extraordinary.

I am a fan of Ferrol. He does not disappoint. This novel is littered with colloquialisms! What a true gem!

As a native Southerner and a lover of Southern literature, I was hoping to love Ferrol Sams' "Downtown." The cousin who recommended it told me that it matched in quality Erskine Caldwell's best literature, but Samms was much funnier. That should have been a warning since Caldwell is hardly my favorite Southern writer, but I still decided to read it.

There are admittedly some funny scenes in the novel that made me laugh out loud, but I was mostly annoyed by the large cast of characters that enter the landscape for a few pages and then disappear, never to be heard from again. And I was really turned off by the antediluvian politics of the narrator (and maybe the stand-in for Sams). One example that really irked me was on page 268 where the narrator compares pedophilia to homosexuality. As someone from an area that is notorious for ten-year-old virgins who only retain their status by running fast, I don't recall Samms equating heterosexuality to pedophilia, but there it is. Both comparisons are obviously ridiculous.

I much prefer, among contemporary Southern writers, the humor of Clyde Edgerton and Lee Smith.