Catbird

March's tale of Southern ennui begins with a one-eyed puppy in a New Orleans trash can and ends with an abused bear in a Philips 66 station; in between, it covers the far less interesting mid-life crisis of musician and newspaperman Zeb Dupree. His father has killed himself; his wife has left; and he's been fired as editor of the suburban Bayou Journal, but the abused pup crying out from a garbage can takes to him immediately. Dog in tow, Zeb climbs into his 1964 Dodge and, pulling on his flask and popping pills the whole way, returns to Cedar Springs, North Carolina, home of his alma mater and a short drive from the family farm. The issues that await him there-the demons that tormented his alcoholic father, the possibility of steady work playing the fiddle-don't get much traction, as Zeb mopes his way through the narrative, winning love, a part-time fiddling gig and a broken-down bus to call home seemingly by chance. March successfully invokes moments of heady Southern surrealism, but the reasons for Zeb's spiral never become fully clear, to him or to the reader. Even if that ambiguity is intentional, it still doesn't work.