Bearings and Distances, by Glenn Arbery
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Bearings and Distances by Glenn Arbery, is a novel of comic ironies and tragic recurrences set in the “post-racial” moment of the American experiment.
In the summer after Barack Obama’s election, Hermia Watson, a scholar of black history, lures the famous (and famously irresponsible) Professor Braxton Forrest back to his hometown in Georgia, using his two daughters as unwitting hostages. Returning alone while his pious wife continues touring Italy, Forrest arrives to the tremblings of his abandoned past and a confrontation with the Furies he thought modernity had left behind. In the course of a few days, Hermia realizes what violent revelations she has begun to unleash about her former lover, her mother, and her own identity—but it is too late to stop what is coming to light.
Arbery revisits the obsessions of the 20th century Southern renaissance in a work that satirizes misconceptions and shallow pieties but takes seriously the wisdom of the Southern literary tradition—and its classical antecedents.
In the summer after Barack Obama’s election, Hermia Watson, a scholar of black history, lures the famous (and famously irresponsible) Professor Braxton Forrest back to his hometown in Georgia, using his two daughters as unwitting hostages. Returning alone while his pious wife continues touring Italy, Forrest arrives to the tremblings of his abandoned past and a confrontation with the Furies he thought modernity had left behind. In the course of a few days, Hermia realizes what violent revelations she has begun to unleash about her former lover, her mother, and her own identity—but it is too late to stop what is coming to light.
Arbery revisits the obsessions of the 20th century Southern renaissance in a work that satirizes misconceptions and shallow pieties but takes seriously the wisdom of the Southern literary tradition—and its classical antecedents.