Jean W.
Cash, author of Flannery O’Connor: A
Life and Larry Brown: A Writer’s Life, reviewed my novel Fall Line in the October 2012 edition of
the journal Studies in American
Culture. She is the first reviewer to make the connection between it
and my first novel, writing:
Fall Line, Starnes’s second novel, is quite
different from Calling,
in which two men from the South—both much damaged by heredity and
experience—meet on a long bus trip between Las Vegas
and Salt Lake City. The journey motif provides an apt setting for
this novel of personal disclosure, tragedy, and tentative redemption for at
least one of the men.
Although
different, she notes the use of the character surname Blizzard in both
books. Cash
writes:
The central character in [Fall Line] is Elmer Blizzard, certainly a relative of Ezekiel
Blizzard from Calling; both resemble
Hazel Motes: Zeke Blizzard has spent more than twenty years as a country
evangelist out to save souls; Elmer Blizzard would like to save the Georgia countryside that Lake Terrell
will swallow. Both characters possess
the intensity and lack of focus that seem to insure their demise.
Blizzard is a name often
encountered in Middle Georgia. I used it because I liked the sound of it, but I also think it's funny that it's a popular name in a place where it almost never snows.
Finally,
she concludes the review with these kind words about Fall Line:
Starnes has produced a novel worthy of attention,
providing real insight into how the power of money and government contributed
to the loss of the agrarian South. Confiscation of private land for money and
tourism was certainly rampant through the South during the first half of the
twentieth century…In addition to the topical issue, the novel carries
universality through Starnes’s characterization of Elmer Blizzard, a man like
many humans, never able to accommodate to life.
Starnes knows his home area and its people and how to write about them
with admirable authority and poetic understanding.
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