cover image A WHOLE WORLD OF TROUBLE

A WHOLE WORLD OF TROUBLE

Helen Chappell, . . Simon & Schuster, $23 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-7432-1529-9

Carrie Hudson, the narrator of this Southern-flavored comic novel by Chapell (Giving Up the Ghost), didn't think that anything could drag her back to her tiny hometown of Oysterback, in rural Maryland. But she's forced back into the bosom of her dysfunctional family when her mother unexpectedly dies while traveling in Florida. Carrie left town 20 years ago, right after high school, and has been living out of her van and traveling the country buying and selling antiques. Her visit home turns out to be far longer than she expected—her brother, the emotionally unstable Wayne ("Wayne hasn't been right since Vietnam, and he wasn't even in the military"), gets into a fight with airport security while trying to bring his mother's ashes home. The ashes are impounded as evidence, and Carrie has to wait around Oysterback, reluctantly catching up with old high school classmates, boyfriends and her melodramatic sister. There are two other (uninvited) guests staying at the house: Jack Shepherd, an old flame of her mother's who was recently fired from his job as a college professor, and Alonzo, another of her mother's boyfriends, an escaped convict. Chappell sometimes lays on the folksy charm a little thick (Carrie says things like "I may have only a couple of years of college to my credit, but I've heard the hoot owls hoot in enough places to know exactly the worst question to ask a... defrocked professor"), but for the most part Carrie's sympathetic, wry voice gives some depth to what would otherwise be a predictable gallery of smalltown oddballs. Agent, Nancy Yost. (May)