Chaotic Forecast
Tennessee native Clint McCown takes on God, death and the weather
In the classic illustration of Chaos Theory, a butterfly in China flaps its wings and causes a thunderstorm in California. The religious explanation for such connectivity is the old saw, "God works in mysterious ways." In his new seriocomic novel The Weatherman (Graywolf Press, 240 pp., $23), Tennessee native Clint McCown explores these conflicting views—random events vs. master plan—through one character's tumultuous life.
During his youth in 1960s Birmingham, Ala., Taylor Wakefield's own life mirrors the turbulence of his age: he witnesses a murder committed by his cousin, and he loses a national spelling bee on a too-easy, but wonderfully apropos word. By the time he's a teenager, Taylor is a washed-up child celebrity from a broken home who has to watch over his shoulder for his psychopathic relative. Things quickly become even odder. In his 20s, he accidentally becomes a weatherman on a local radio and TV network. He knows nothing about predicting the weather, but seeing his chance to right a wrong, he decides to use his pulpit to expose his guilty cousin, the now born-again assistant attorney general.
During his first TV forecast, Taylor observes that it may or may not rain and warns that one of the candidates in the upcoming primary election killed somebody. The stuffed-shirt anchorman doesn't like the unconventional approach and demands, "What the hell kind of weather report was that?!" Taylor's answer: "Postmodern, I'd say."
Despite the rough start, Taylor keeps his job and goes on to discover how his past keeps influencing his present. He finds out what happened to the beautiful girl who won the spelling bee. He sees the effects of his secret knowledge on the politics of his state. And he quickly becomes the center of a gathering storm over which he has no control. Or does he? McCown bombards his protagonist with a series of increasingly incredible, often comical events, in the process asking some seriously cosmic questions: How much control do we have? Are we creating our own weather by flapping our wings, or is God directing every action to His own ends? The Weatherman, winner of the S. Mariella Gable Prize and full of sharply drawn characters and scenes, is a fun way to ponder that philosophical riddle.
Clint McCown will read from The Weatherman at Rhino Booksellers, 2 p.m. Sept. 4.
—Chris Scott
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