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.

In this provocative novel, Naumoff inexorably draws the reader into his characters' world, a world of families with ties that go beyond love, or even hatred. Sally and Robert Zilman, a young married couple, at first seem the only "normal" people in the book. Sally's parents, Ervin and Margaret Neal, exist only to torment each other, with Sally in the middle trying to make peace. Robert's parents never forgave him for marrying a gentile, and he fights with them during each annual visit. The plot is almost beside the point here; what's really important are the dynamics of the characters' relationships, and what Naumoff is saying, by extension, about husbands and wives, parents and children. He excels at getting to the core of each character and analyzing why they behave the way they do, from Sally's premarital promiscuity, to Robert's and Ervin's need to believe in her "purity," to Margaret's inability to see that her marriage has shattered. All this could be grim and graceless in another writer's hands, but Naumoff has imbued even the bleakest passages with a sardonic humor, and has, in addition, masterfully evoked the eastern North Carolina setting. Two decades ago, Naumoff won a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship and other high awards; then he stopped writing for 14 years. This novel was worth waiting for.
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