Customer Reviews

Kentuckiana

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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I thought that Kentuckiana was a good book and the characters were all moving, although very flawed. Jean especially was an interesting one, and the scene where he "talks" to his dead father in the graveyard was one of the best in the book. It was both sad and funny. I would recommend this as a good read for anyone with skeletons in their closet.

While Payne's book does not fit the mold of mainstream pop culture fiction, readers would be doing themselves a disservice by missing this sometimes harrowing, often touching, and always interesting book. The Miles family does indeed take on a life of its own, and Payne finds a way to redeem what seems like a family that is all but lost. I defy even one reader not to find a "family member" here that rings familiar. I cried tears of joy at the tender moments experienced by the characters who sorely needed them. I read the book in one sitting as I could not put it down.

Kentuckiana is a brilliant novel, and I urge everyone to read it. Payne presents the Miles--a suburban family forced to exist solely for the whims of his metafictional narrator--in an enrapturing, entertaining, and challenging manner, and by doing so, offers a provacative glimpse into the basic yearnings and darkness of the human heart. We are given well-crafted characters existing within the same collective conscious as the reader and, remarkably, in such an intricate and detailed manner that one can't help but empathize with the characters who face some of the most dreadful events life can throw at them, and with the narrator whose own bleak life compels him to create them. The dark appeal of this novel resides in the somewhat naive hope that they will eventually escape their dysfunction and, if not exist in happiness, at least not cause any more suffering, either to themselves or to each other. The comic undertones are bleak and disturbing--this is N OT a novel for the faint of heart (In one episode, a live cat is incinerated--ghastly and sickening, and one of the most brilliant bits in the novel). Nor is this book an easy read; it requires concentration, a suspension of disbelief, and the willingness to identify with and care about a set of characters incapable of caring about themselves. If you're up to the challenge, this novel will be a wonderful literary event for you.

Not since reading styron's Lie Down in Darkness years ago have I had such an emotional response to the power and absoluteness of someone's writing as I felt upon reading Payne's Kentuckiana. From the first page, I was absorbed and caught dead center by the honesty that resonated for me in the words I read. What the author gives readers here is a staggering, intensely persuasive, and haunting perspective of a flesh-and-blood American family. Despite the "metaphysical" premise of the opening chapter that we are to meet and interact with the smoke and mirrors of fiction, the characters proceed instantly to create their own dynamics and come alive in the mind of the reader. It doesn't matter who they are, but that they are. Alive, real, in the complexity of their relationships with one another in the settings that enclose/thwart/sustain/catalyze/compel them. Their immediacies, attitudes and behaviors are made compelling by the articulateness, the lyrical intelligence, the richness of their thoughts and words, so that their tragedy lies not in their disability (as distinct from inability) to communicate emotional pain, protest, anguish or joy within the family framework or the confines of other relationships. It is, rather, a sense of the inchoate, the unspokenness underlying the whole fabric of the straightforward context of the "ordinary" family unit from which they spring (and with which they are irrevocably enmeshed) that comprises the tragedy here--a bright sadness or gap of silence that remains mysterious, haunting to the mind and heart, even as their words flow on and on, over and through the misactions, the skewed attempts, the growths, acceptances, failures, compromises and intractabilities. I heartily recommend this novel for the insights it offers into the failures and successes of modern families.

If folks didn't catch the hyperbolic comedy of Payne's novel, then people are as humorous as the skiffy people that Harlan Ellison disdains. Kentuckiana creates wonderful personalities; often disturbing, but more often exposed with comic anecdotes that struck me with familiarity and resourceful curiosity. Johnny Payne is one of the finest storytellers in the field today; he cuts into the deep pathos of the Miles family with remarkable precision and insight. I high recommend this book.

The characters are full of personality; bizarre, sometimes stubborn, always real individuals. I like how the author is able to bring to life so many different and interesting characters in a seemingly effortless way. I think that's the real mark of a writer's creativity: to make the difficult appear easy and somehow natural. The author Johnny Payne possesses this special creativity. I read the book in one afternoon and will re-read it. Payne packs in a lot of substance in this novel and I think a re-reading will help me enjoy and understand the novel better. A beautifully crafted piece of fiction. I give it the highest mark.