Cousins

Description

From Publishers Weekly Poet Jiles ( Blackwater ), on a trip home from Canada to the Missouri Ozarks, has a romance with Jim Johnson, a married retired army officer and Vietnam vet. Despite their political disagreements (she's a dove, he's a hawk), Johnson leaves his wife to travel with Jiles across the U.S. South on a pilgrimage to find and interview the author's cousins on her father's side. Jiles successfully brings their love affair to life, recounting mutual passion as well as fiery arguments with spirit and wit. Woven throughout the travel anecdotes are interesting verbatim interviews with Jiles's cousins, who unravel family mysteries and give her a new perspective on her background. An inventive memoir combining adventure, introspection and the redemptive power of love between two middle-aged people who revel in their differences. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more From Library Journal This is the result of award-wining poet/writer Jiles's seven-month quest to find and interview her cousins, scattered throughout southeast Missouri, the Midwest, and the South, and to rediscover her dead father through her family's memories. Jiles presents her cousins' unadorned narratives, punctuating them with descriptions of her volatile relationship with her traveling companion and lover, Jim Johnson, who is fleeing a messy divorce. The cumulative effect is of being privy to the emergence of a family's mythology. By the book's end, the interviews have merged into a portrait of an American family, a portrait at times superficial but always real, immediate, and true. One might wish for more psychological depth and longer, more probing interviews, or for more of Jiles's own analysis, but the book ultimately succeeds on its own terms. For most public libraries.- Ellen Finnie Duranceau, MIT Lib.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more See all Editorial Reviews