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Using the meteoric success of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus positioned himself among America's most original and psychologically employed storytellers. If his first comic book mapped the late nineteenth-century South, Local Souls brings the twisted hilarity of Flannery O'Connor kicking into our new hundred years.Through memorable language and bawdy humor, Gurganus returns to his mythological Comes, North Carolina, home of Widow. This first work in a decade offers three novellas mirroring today's face-lifted South, a zone revolutionized around freer sexuality, looser family ties, and superior telecommunications, yet it celebrates those local people who've chosen to stay local. In doing so, Local Souls uncovers certain old patterns - adultery, incest, obsession - still quite definitely alive inside our New South, a "Winesburg, Ohio" with high-speed Internet. Wells Tower says of Gurganus, "No living article writer knows more about how humans matter to each other." Such ties of love produce amusing, if wrenching, problems: "Fear Not" provides us a banker's little girl seeking the child she was compelled to surrender when barely fifteen, only to find an adult rescuer she may have developed. In "Saints Have Moms," a cherished high school valedictorian disappears throughout a trip to Africa, granting her ambitious mom a postponed fame that transforms against her. And in a remarkable "Decoy," the doctor-patient companionship between two wedded men breaks toward desire just as a biblical overflow shatters their area and rearranges their fates.Gurganus discovers fresh pathos in historical tensions: between marriage and Eros, parenthood and personal fulfillment. He creates about erotic craving for food and social embarrassment with Twain's knife-edged glee. By caring Comes, Gurganus dramatizes the passing of Hawthorne's small-town nation into those Twitter-nourished lives we have now expect and relish.Four ages earlier, John Cheever pronounced Allan Gurganus "the most technically gifted and morally reactive writer of his era." Local Souls confirms Cheever's prescient trust. It deepens the luster of Gurganus's reputation for compassion and laughter. His dark humor leaves us with lasting love for his heroes and the aching aftermath of real human consequences. Here is a universal work about a village.
