Description
Life, love, death, and laughs in a small American town
The second novel of the Darby Chronicles follows Ollie Jordan, a man with no education, no mentors, and a serious Freudian hang-up. A family history of poverty, stubborn pride, and a culture that runs contrary to mainstream society have robbed Ollie and his people of opportunity, even hope. They live by a culture of succor and ascendancy. When Ollie is evicted from his shack, he breaks his drinking rules and heads out into the wilderness with his disabled son, Willow, literally chained to him. Father and son are doomed. How that doom plays itself out, as experienced by the disturbed but insightful Ollie Jordan, is what makes A Little More Than Kin unique in contemporary American literature. Hebert gives his rural underclass protagonist the depths of a tragic hero.
Though A Little More Than Kin is action-packed and its prose is clean, hard, lyrical, and sometimes very funny, the book is at its heart an exploration into a brilliant mind that has laid waste to itself. This novel will appeal to readers who enjoy prose that explores the human psyche at its most perverse.
Author: Ernest Hebert
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 08/03/2021
Pages: 232
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.40w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9780819580009
ISBN10: 0819580007
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Literary
- Fiction | Small Town & Rural
The second novel of the Darby Chronicles follows Ollie Jordan, a man with no education, no mentors, and a serious Freudian hang-up. A family history of poverty, stubborn pride, and a culture that runs contrary to mainstream society have robbed Ollie and his people of opportunity, even hope. They live by a culture of succor and ascendancy. When Ollie is evicted from his shack, he breaks his drinking rules and heads out into the wilderness with his disabled son, Willow, literally chained to him. Father and son are doomed. How that doom plays itself out, as experienced by the disturbed but insightful Ollie Jordan, is what makes A Little More Than Kin unique in contemporary American literature. Hebert gives his rural underclass protagonist the depths of a tragic hero.
Though A Little More Than Kin is action-packed and its prose is clean, hard, lyrical, and sometimes very funny, the book is at its heart an exploration into a brilliant mind that has laid waste to itself. This novel will appeal to readers who enjoy prose that explores the human psyche at its most perverse.
Author: Ernest Hebert
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 08/03/2021
Pages: 232
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.40w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9780819580009
ISBN10: 0819580007
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Literary
- Fiction | Small Town & Rural
About the Author
ERNEST HEBERT, retired professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College, resides near Keene, New Hampshire, with his wife Medora and two cats that meditate on Hebert's Franco-American roots and rural New England sensibility. For more about author Ernest Hebert and the Darby Chronicles: https: //sites.google.com/view/ernesthebertdarby