A multigenerational story of familial secrets of love and loss through war and peace in the rural South
The Copeland family of Listre, North Carolina, gathers every May to clean up the graveyard and talk. Every one of them has stories to tell, and it is Albert Copeland who writes it all down in the notebooks he started years ago to track the progress of the floatplanes he builds. The notebooks hold all the best-kept secrets—of love, loss, and yearnings to let go. The Floatplane Notebooks, Clyde Edgerton's third novel, first published in 1988, is a multigenerational story of the Copeland family, spanning from the antebellum era to the Vietnam War.
The novel cycles through a series of six narrators, including a generations-old wisteria vine that shares elements of a dark history the family members cannot and will not reveal. Edgerton balances the comic with the realistic in a deft portrayal of the rural South and also depicts elements of the sense of loss that is a consequence of war. The Floatplane Notebooks was a selection of the Book of the Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club.
This Southern Revivals edition includes a new introduction from the author and a preface from series editor Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr., director of the University of South Carolina Institute for Southern Studies.
Writer, musician, and artist Clyde Edgerton is the Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is the author of ten novels, a memoir, and a book of advice. Three of his novels—Raney, Walking Across Egypt, and Killer Diller—have been made into films. He has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lyndhurst Prize, a Thomas Wolfe Prize, and membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and he has been named to the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristina, and their children.
"The Floatplane Notebooks has all the marks of a master storyteller going straight for the mystery itself. All the marks, that is, of [an] American classic."—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Clyde Edgerton is a miner of considerable skills, burrowing into the hillside of humanity to find the ore of characters so pure and so real they might just sit down beside us and tell us a tale."—Washington Post Book World
"A wonderful celebration of family and tradition, with warts, humor, tragedy, and triumph. . . . An exceedingly rich book, a celebration of the human spirit that is brilliantly conceived, structured, and executed."—Cincinnati Post
". . . Among the wisest, most heartfelt writing to emerge from the South in our generation. . . . Meredith Copeland's first-person account of his Vietnam experience, homecoming, and physical paralysis in North Carolina is breathtakingly stark, full, and real."—Los Angeles Times
