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Fans of Padgett Powell's first novel, Edisto, will be pleased with the arrival of his third, Edisto Revisited, in which we rejoin Simons Everson Manigault in his characteristically casual search for a place in the late 20th-century scheme. Having just graduated with a degree in architecture (his conventional father, The Progenitor, has prevailed over the literary Doctor, at least in choice of major), Simons is no longer a child, no longer in a position to stand watch as the world unfolds around him. This is the big Life, and as much as he might look with a suspicious eye toward the fact, the time has come for him to find his role in it.
Toward the conclusion of Edisto, when the young Simons is trying to find that role among the foreign terrains of condoed Hilton Head Island, he notes: "I had the picture. I was an anomaly in a regular soup of high-water khaki duck-asses, white-soled Top-Sidered gentry bound for college and careers suitable to family name, which is a hint odd if you remember ten days ago I was an anomaly in a backwater of blacks with the same family names, bound nowhere, but bound." The question in Edisto Revisited is, then, Will Simons always be that anomaly, and if so, how will he join the modern world in spite of that fact?
To answer that question, and in lieu of joining the Marines (too much paperwork) or interviewing with Atlantan architectural firms, Simons returns to the island of his childhood. What begins as a trip home to his roots becomes in time a journey to the loading docks of a Texas fish house, to a commune of questionable ways and means in the bayous of Louisiana, even to a less-than-orthodox relationship with a close relative. In Simons the graduate we find the same sharp, take-no-prisoners-not-even-myself wit we found in Simons the boy. Powell refuses to let the hypocrisies and wrongs of the world bury his hero. We laugh out loud with Simons as he goes along his way, if, like him, a bit nervously at times. He is a keen, comic observer, and he is and always will be a child of Edisto, a child of sea breezes, and mullet holes and scrub jungle.
Charlie Geer writes in Charleston, South Carolina.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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