Customer Reviews

Polar

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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

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!

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.

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.

A lost child is certainly not a topic that would normally be considered for satire. T. R. Pearson uses the event and the actions that follow for observations that are scathing in their commentary on human nature that will be all too familiar. When you are done with this story you may well agree the child who wandered off made the correct choice.

The spectacle that is made of a child presumed missing is often a circus that the media dominates. The familiar collection of flowers and sentiment that mark a spot of interest, in this case, is constructed initially of flowers and bouquets stolen from a cemetery. The parents of the missing child are certainly culpable to a degree and the author makes them either pay or sell-out in manners so absurd that if they appeared on television tomorrow, the events would appear common.

The local seer who transforms from a twenty-four hour a day Satin Channel adult film junkie in to a predictor of events is as well done as it is searing. Predicting events that are of no consequence with ease and repetition this Virginia savant is useless when it comes to any issue of importance.

This is the first time I have read this author and he is definitely an original.

For my money, this short novel is even better than Pearson's brilliant "Short History of a Small Place." (Both of them are in my top 100). Pearson has matured wonderfully, and has now achieved a complete mastery of the comic incident, comparable to the style of Ed McClanahan but with greater depth of feeling. (Not to disparage McClanahan; he is very, very good.) With this book I think Pearson establishes himself as a "Major American Voice." I suspected he had mined his experiences for all they were worth and would fade from the scene, but this book shows that he is ready to do even greater things. Note that the subject matter here is quite rough; "ribald" would be the polite term. Where "Short History" was PG, this is R. You will not enjoy this book if you find sexual references and foul language offensive, but if you can handle it, you will find it laugh-out-loud funny.

Lynn Hamilton has written a wonderful review of T. R Pearson's POLAR, something that gives us all an idea of what the book is about. What the book is about is not why I read this guy, though. I've read all of Pearson's books, and I look forward to a kind of roller coaster ride. The ride is part plot always, but the big part is riding Pearson's prose. For me, that prose is the greatest joy, and this writer is a master of sentences and paragraphs. What more can a reader ask for? If you have not read T. R. Pearson, it's high time you did.

Polar is the story of a small, southern town and its off-the-wall inhabitants. The novel primarily concerns Clayton, ... suddenly calls himself Titus and begins to have strange prominitions and to act strange, and Ray, the deputy sheriff in town, likable in an almost goofy way. Tay realizes the power of Titus' premonitions and believes tha they may help in his search for a missing young girl. The story is told in a very funny manner--as if one nosy gossip (our nameless narrator) is recounting the events to another nosy gossip from a neighboring town. Polar if a very funny, very interesting novel told with a truly unique voice.

Known for his poignant and humorous social satire of the rural South and his rolling, colorful, meandering sentences, Pearson has often been compared to Twain and Faulkner. But he's his own man as he proves once again in "Polar," the story of Deputy Ray Tatum's (last seen in "Blue Ridge") search for a missing child. The novel begins with one man's mysterious transformation from slug to seer and proceeds through the odd and ornery collection of people that make up this small upland town in Virginia's Blue Ridge.

As is his usual habit, Clayton, the beer swilling slob, is passing his time in line at the local grocery mart regaling his captive audience with the particulars of last night's porno film, which "never seemed to work on Clayton in quite the way they were meant to as he was prone to get caught up in the stories". Suddenly, dumping his purchases before the cashier, Tiffany, ("saddled with a comprehensive ignorance of produce that qualifies her for duty in the express lane") Clayton ceases to be himself. " 'Please, sir, do call me Titus,' he said to Tiffany. 'Everyone does these days.' "

Clayton walks off without his change, which is strange enough, but then Ray Tatum notices Clayton's satellite dish is no longer pointed to the porno channel, stops to check on him and finds him babbling nonsensically. Until, that is, Ray touches his shoulder and Clayton makes a cryptic pronouncement about the missing little girl that almost everyone but Ray has given up on.

The child, Angela Denise, is the 3-year-old daughter of the book's most charmless character, Gloria Dunn, a self-absorbed Dayton, Ohio, sophisticate with a hapless would-be farmer husband. Gloria's disdain for all things rural and her instant celebrity after her daughter's disappearance catapult her into great success as a vitriolic talk-show host.

Long after the public has forgotten and Gloria Dunn has moved on, Ray continues to search. He's a quiet, melancholy, sensible man, haunted by the accidental death of his own small daughter and chiefly interesting to the town for his outspoken African-American girlfriend, Kit. Though he gets frustratingly little from Clayton, Ray continues to look in, ask about the child and, with his girlfriend's help, poke at the mystery of Clayton's transformation.

Meanwhile, Clayton's reputation grows when his new clairvoyance predicts a dog's demise - though only in retrospect. Citizens flock to his door with their questions and Clayton will often supply them with a nonsense phrase or two, which, more often than not, turn out - in hindsight - to be remarkably accurate predictions.

While Ray goes about his policing work, and drops in on Clayton to collect stray crumbs of cryptic information and view the progress of the image Clayton sporadically sketches on his chimney, a larger picture begins to emerge. It encompasses in serendipitous fashion the teenagers who grapple on lover's lane, the conscience-wracked husband on the verge of adultery and fatherhood, the septic tank con-man, the opinionated librarian and many, many more; full-blooded characters with quirks, foibles and plenty of relatives. Like Russell, the phone man, who carries around a kidney stone and shares the fabulous Clayton-inspired tale of its discharge with all and sundry until at last silenced by dire threats from Ray. "It seems Ray had scolded Russell into something like a vampire's ethics and standards in that Russell could say what he wished about his stone only once invited to speak."

Pearson's language and his unblinkered affection for all but the most depraved of his characters drives the story. The plot is well-developed and admirably resolved but it's Pearson's style and characters that bring his readers back.

You can read the plot summary above. All I can say is this author, besides being just plain hilarious,uses adjectives and adverbs that create perfect word pictures. A character is not dumb but "comprehensively uninformed", the grocery mart has a "glacial express lane", etc. And the characters are truly "characters". My husband, who is from Staunton, VA, is going to say this sounds more like West Virgina than Virginia, but, hey, the author's from Virginia, so who better?