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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
“The Clock is Ticking” a review by Anna Dunlap Higgins Robert Inman. The Governor’s Lady. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 2013.
Anna Dunlap Higgins, Professor of English at Gordon State College in Barnesville, GA, grew up in Blowing Rock, NC. She has written several essays for NCLR based on her interviews with North Carolina writers, including, in the 2002 issue, Robert Inman. Robert Inman received his BA in Radio and Television and his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. He is the author of five novels, a collection of nonfiction, seven stage plays, and six screenplays. After working and living in Charlotte, NC, for years, he currently lives in Connover and Boone, NC.
Near the end of Robert Inman’s most recent novel The Governor’s Lady, a “crusty curmudgeon” of a reporter announces, “The clock is ticking” (321).* Perhaps it’s a line Inman himself said in his old days as press secretary for Governor Albert Brewer of Alabama; or when he covered national, state, and local politics for a Montgomery, AL, television station; or, later, as he prepared to anchor the evening news for WBTV in Charlotte, NC. I’ve never worked for a governor, a newspaper, or a newsroom, but I have worked for a member of Congress. I recall late nights in Washington, Congress in session, members of the press crowded together in little herds along the route I took from the Cannon House Office Building to the grounds of the Capitol. In my hands were the papers my member of Congress called for me to fetch, scribbled notes outlining favors received and owed that he needed quickly because the clock was ticking. Some of this same heartpounding intensity can be felt in The Governor’s Lady. Robert Inman is well known as a craftsman of novels, screenplays, stage plays, and essays that tend to focus on Southern towns and local folks. There is a slow, sweettea kind of atmosphere to all he has written, even when the human story is intense. With this newest work, Inman has created a fastpaced novel of political intrigue, suspense, and mystery more akin to a John Grisham work than to Inman’s own canon. From the opening paragraphs until the final page, there is a sense of urgency, a breathless race to uncover
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mysteries and resolve debts. There seems with each page the possibility that this classically structured five-part novel may well end with as many dead bodies as one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. In The Governor’s Lady, a clock does indeed seem to be always ticking. Part One begins in medias res, on the inauguration day of the protagonist, soon-to-be woman governor Cooper Lanier. It’s predawn; the forecast is predicting snow. Cooper’s long-estranged mother, Mickey Spainhour, lies dying in a hospital bed, demanding whiskey, cigarettes, and access to news coverage. Local and state television crews jostle for a glimpse of the new governor, or, better yet, of her presidential candidate husband, Pickett Lanier, the former governor. The idea for this intriguing couple’s story was actually planted in the author’s mind years ago when the Alabama legislature turned down Governor George Wallace’s request to run for a second term. The not-to-bedefeated Wallace simply “ran his wife,” as Inman puts it. Although Lurleen Wallace won out over a dozen men – in a race with no runoff – “there was no doubt that [George] was still in charge” during her stint in office. Likewise, long before the novel’s first day is over, there is the sense that Pickett Lanier has a scheme similar to George Wallace’s, though this puppeteer’s plans seem more ominously secret, more darkly sinister. From this first day, however, readers can tell that Cooper Lanier is no Lurleen Wallace. By early morning, day two of the novel, the skies have become heavy, the local news rooms still
* The phrase “crusty curmudgeon” is from the reviewer’s phone interview with the author, on 11 Sept. 2013. All quotes not otherwise attributed are from this interview.