Bøger af James Swearingen

Cephton Lansbury has retired to historic Savannah and made the acquaintance of a group of bright, well-educated professionals. Among the elegant houses in this glorious tropical setting, they enjoy a convivial life of good food, drink, and conversation. Novelist Anders Ratliff records it all on the way to understanding something quite different. Blind and destructive fores are at work beneath the tranquil social surface. Natural and human adversities erupt when Cephton, a philosopher, falls for the seductive Ava Foster during a hurricane and her jealous husband Lucas takes revenge at the annual Christmas party. The same night, Anders draws the reluctant Cephton into a calamitous midnight foray into the swamps looking for pirate manuscripts. But it's the fascinating and enigmatic psychoanalyst Iris St. John who amazes them all when she reveals a scandalous marriage proposal and declares them all prodigal sons--and daughters. The result is one of the most wide-ranging explorations of love in recent fiction. The Prodigals tackles the riddles of everyday life with a riveting intellectual and philosophical analysis that bends the conventions of the novel as an art form.

Black Sheep tells the story of the mythical American family named Dysen. Tom Dysen and John Williston, former college roommates, take a canoe trip down the Suwannee River from the Okefenokee Swamp. John, the approximate protagonist, is a young black intellectual from the north, who is escaping personal troubles by coming south and plunging into the wilderness. Days later he emerges awakened by developments in which more than his identity and vocation have been shattered and reconstructed. One catalyst is family stories told by Tom's father, Garret Dysen, on the banks of the St. Johns River in Jacksonville. The stories recount episodes of family history, from the seventeenth-century Dutch ancestor, Gerrit van Duyssen, through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. A second catalyst is a young female violinist playing Bach in the wilderness in the middle of the night. Among the themes are a congenital estrangement between Dysen fathers and sons, and, for John, who is writing a doctoral thesis in political theory, an unexpected confrontation of ideals descending from southern agrarianism and northern industrialism. Black Sheep is a political and philosophical novel for people with the leisure for thoughtful reading.

In The Valmont, a posh condo development in New Orleans, once an Ursuline convent, seven residents-a real estate developer, a Russian ballerina, a legal secretary, a TV personality, a US Attorney, a French professor, and a Jesuit priest embody the classical vices. Their intertwined lives pass through bedroom and theatre, carnival and courtroom, exorcism and suicide, as the narrator studies the infirmities of modern life with an eye to a cure. Meanwhile, the inexistent voice of angel or spirit or daimon haunts the Valmont, finding the moral diagnosis itself curiously symptomatic of the current state of the human soul. Maladies is a philosophical novel for readers with lively minds, keen on hope in dark times.