cover image CAPTAIN SATURDAY

CAPTAIN SATURDAY

Robert Inman, . . Little, Brown, $24.95 (464pp) ISBN 978-0-316-41502-6

At once deeply affecting and warmly humorous, this fourth novel by Inman (Dairy Queen Days) faintly echoes the bittersweet inflections of such literary forebears as Flannery O'Connor. After 20 years of minor celebrity as a TV weatherman, Will Baggett is fired when the station is sold to a conglomerate. While rushing to meet a deadline to collect his $50,000 contract buyout, he injures his knee. A photo of him on an EMS gurney winds up on the front page of the newspaper, the headline charging him with running a red light and resisting arrest; he's now not only out of a job, but also unemployable in the only professional persona he has ever known. Meanwhile, Will's marriage grows ever more shaky as his wife establishes a successful career in upscale real estate by cozying up to her boss. Retreating to the homestead of his eccentric cousins, Will (now Wilbur again) licks his wounds and contemplates both his past and future. When he returns to face the traffic charges, he unluckily wears his medical-student son's jacket to court and winds up charged with possession of marijuana—a felony offense in North Carolina. Wilbur soon discovers that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Only a couple of years shy of age 50 and suddenly an unemployed ex-con after a brief stay in jail, Wilbur now has to reconstruct his identity. Peopled with vivid, endearingly quixotic characters and filled with dead-on insights into a shallow New South that defines itself by club memberships and designer labels, this richly textured epic is a paean to the vagaries of the human heart. Southern author tour. (Jan. 8)