The Floatplane Notebooks; a novel

Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1988. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Steven Cragg. [14], 265, [1] pages. Signed by the author on the half-title page. DJ is in a plastic sleeve. DJ has an "Autographed Edition" sticker on front. Clyde Edgerton (born May 20, 1944) is an American author. He has published a dozen books, most of them novels, two of which have been adapted for film. He is also a professor, teaching creative writing. In 1962 Edgerton enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, majoring in English. During this time he was a student in the Air Force ROTC program where he learned to fly a small plane. After graduating in 1966, he entered the Air Force and served five years as a fighter pilot in the United States, Korea, Japan, and Thailand. After his service, Edgerton got his Master's degree in English and began a job as an English teacher at his old high school. He also earned a doctorate. He decided to become a writer in 1978 after watching Eudora Welty read a short story on public television. Publication of Edgerton's first novel, Raney, the plot of which revolves around the marriage of a Free Will Baptist and an Episcopalian, ultimately led to Edgerton's leaving the teaching staff at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina (a Baptist institution). His later work, Killer Diller, is a thinly veiled satire of that university and its administration, with whom Edgerton clashed over Raney. His novel Redeye was inspired by a visit to the Mesa Verde and Anasazi cliff dwellings; the book is a historical novel set in 1890s Colorado.[citation needed] His tenth novel, Night Train, follows two friends—one White and one Black—in the segregated South of the 1960s. The Copeland family of Listre, North Carolina, goes back a long way. Meredith Copeland's father, Albert, keeps a sort of written family record in some notebooks he bought to log the flights of his home-built floatplane, a project Albert first undertook in 1956, when his children were just kids. Now that the kids are grown -- Thatcher has a son of his own, Meredith and Mark are back from Vietnam, and Noralee is off dating hippies -- the notebooks are thick with the floatplane's failures to lift off and bulging with color Polaroids of the wisteria blossoms near the family plot, favorite family dogs, Thatcher and Bliss's wedding, records of Noralee's height and weight, a diagram of the graveyard, a newspaper story about wild-child Meredith's many backfired schemes. This novel travels back in time more than one hundred years, to the Copeland bride who first planted the wisteria by the back porch that would take over the surrounding woods, and then down to the present again to show how even though times change, people are pretty much the same. Derived from a Kirkus review: Another folksy and warmhearted novel about the lower-middle class in the almost-modern South. Edgerton imposes a demanding literary technique--different voices speaking in turn. What everyone's talking about is the Copeland family, a close-knit and curious bunch of southerners currently presided over by Albert, whose wartime experience as a bridge-building frogman explains his obsession with "friction reduction" and "natural suspension"--his all-purpose explanations for just about anything. Since the mid-50's, he's puttered around with a floatplane--a silly flying contraption that's supposed to take off from a body of water. Over the years, members of his family tell us about other comic adventures as well, most centering on Albert's son, Meredith, a mischievous boy with an "ever-present twinkle in his eye"--as his adoring sister-in-law Bliss puts it. Also attesting to Meredith's antic behavior are his boorish brother, Thatcher, and his fatherless cousin, Mark, Meredith's reluctant co-conspirator. They both record priceless chapters in Copeland family lore, hilarious set-pieces that include the time Meredith fell through the kitchen floor and into an old well underneath, and the time his interracial basketball game was postponed on account of coal dust. Family rituals--the annual grave-cleanings and the yearly hunting trips to Florida--provide further evidence of their appealing lunacy. But the graveyard's wisteria vine--which also gets to speak!--alludes to a darker history, full of tragic deaths. Edgerton's tone downshifts when he brings Mark and Meredith into the Vietnam era and a war that renders the latter a cripple. Hope springs eternal, though, in the literally uplifting ending--a joyous moment when one of Mr. Copeland's cockamamie notions proves triumphant.