Writers All Around

MARY SAUMSJane Thistle expected a quiet life when she retired to Tullulah, Ala., after traveling the world with her military husband. But fans of Mary Saums know that life for her now-widowed protagonist hasn’t exactly been quiet. In the first novel in the series, Thistle and Twigg, Jane contended with a murderer, inherited a sizable amount of land, and developed an ability to sense spirits. Most important, she met Phoebe Twigg, also a widow, who has lived her entire life in Tullulah and is a force of nature all her own. Now, in Mighty Old Bones (St. Martin’s Minotaur, 298 pp., $23.95), the two retirees encounter purse snatchers, thunderstorms, mysterious bones, handsome men, crazy relatives and a heart-stealing dog. Just what a reader wants from a cozy mystery.

Saums has a sharp eye for the incongruities of small-town life and the heart to celebrate its eccentricities. She especially has a great deal of fun with Phoebe, who can earnestly tell her babysitting charges that they must reject violence and turn the other cheek—and immediately afterward switch on the television: “Let’s see who Mr. Schwarzenegger is going to blow to kingdom come for the good old U. S. of A. tonight.” If she sometimes seems a little provincial, her heart always ends up in the right place: “Jane is my hero, even if she doesn’t go to church. She was raised Church of England over yonder, and I don’t think they believe in attending services, so it’s not her fault.” Plus you’ve got to love a woman who uses a book for target practice because the author has the bad taste to give a villain in North Dakota a Southern accent.

Mary Saums will read from Mighty Old Bones at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 5, at Barnes & Noble Brentwood. —Faye Jones

JONATHAN MILESTen or so years from now, an enterprising Ph.D. candidate will write a dissertation called something like “Assholes and Idiots in First-Person Narrators of the Early 21st Century.” It will concern the decision of so many novelists to feature first-person narrators, even though such protagonists are notoriously unreliable, and even though most of those in early 21st century novels are unlikable as well. Is it a measure of the Facebookization of American culture? Or are readers truly drawn to the pseudo-apologetics of a bunch of self-absorbed jerks?

Consider Benny Ford, the down-and-out narrator of Jonathan Miles’ absolutely brilliant debut novel, Dear American Airlines (Houghton Mifflin, 192 pp., $22). Benny is a failed poet, failed lover, failed husband and failed father who has been given one last chance to redeem his own sorry life: an invitation to fly from New York to L.A. to attend his gay daughter’s commitment ceremony. Through circumstances largely of his own making, Benny hasn’t seen or talked with her since she was an infant, and he finds himself in something like a state of wonder at this unexpected opportunity to explain, if not actually make right, the abominations of his past: “I don’t deny I was once an ogre. What’s harder and more painful for me to gauge is if I’m still one.” At his daughter’s wedding, he expects to find out.

Then he gets stranded in Chicago, and so begins Dear American Airlines, an elaborate letter of complaint to the corporation whose greed and ineptitude are about to cost Benny his last hope of redemption. But the story he tells while waiting for a flight is less a first-person act of self-justification than a hilarious, heartbreaking, nuanced exploration of how a self is constructed in the first place. Benny Ford isn’t remotely reliable or likable, but it’s impossible not to root for him to get what he wants, even if it isn’t what he deserves: “Damn but I wanted a cigarette. A drink. Another chance. A soul scrubbed clean. A world made better not worse by my footprints upon it.”

Jonathan Miles will read from Dear American Airlines at 7 p.m. Friday, June 6, at Davis-Kidd Booksellers. —Margaret Renkl

RICK BRAGGFathers don’t so much have to earn the love of sons as just accept it. That’s the lesson of Rick Bragg’s third book about his family, this one exploring the complicated and volatile relationship he had with his handsome, hard-drinking, self-destructive dad Charles Bragg and now the one he has with his own stepson, who adores him despite Bragg’s imperfections and doubts about his ability to be a parent.

The author’s honesty in this latest biographical dig, The Prince of Frogtown (Random House, 272 pp., $24), is affecting and clearly therapeutic for both Bragg and, depending on who’s turning the pages, the reader. He writes that it was Willie Morris who told him long ago that he would not have clarity or calm until he took to the page about his father.