The Night of the Weeping Women - Hardcover

Lawrence Naumoff is the author of six novels and lots of stories. He’s won a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Award, a Thomas Wolfe fiction award, and the Walter Raleigh prize for the best work of fiction in North Carolina for the year 2005. His books have been published in Finland, England, Spain, Holland, and Germany, and he teaches creative writing at UNC in Chapel Hill. His novels are: The Night of the Weeping Women; Rootie Kazootie; Taller Women; Silk Hope, NC; A Plan for Women; and A Southern Tragedy in Crimson and Yellow.

This first novel depicts the separate-bedroom marriage of bigoted Southerner and Korean War veteran Ervin Neal. There are two women he makes weep one night; his wife, Margaret, who still loves him, and his daughter, Sally, who suffered grossly after he read her diary. Now Sally Zilman, she is barren due to Neal's treatment. His camper, much more central to the problems in his marriage than the pulpy title might indicate, figures in his endless running away, particularly with his two-faced girlfriend, Angie. But the world is shrinking, and his camper smashes him right back home on the night of reckoning. The prose, though competent, sometimes meanders. But stay with the book anyway: the insights rise above the technique. Kenneth Mintz, Bayonne P.L., N.J.
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