90
2015
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 24
COURTESY OF TERRY KENNEDY
We Americans love our cars. In every installed halogen light, lift-kit equipped truck, or aftermarket bass speaker, we see the dedication and infatuation owners have with their automobiles. Symbolically, of course, it is far more than the six-cylinder engines and leather seating that intrigues us; it is the uniquely American promise of freedom and escape that our interstates provide. American literature as varied as On the Road (1957), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), and even large chunks of In Cold Blood (1966), demonstrates this concept, so Michael Parker joins a strong roster with his new novel, All I Have in This World. Set primarily in the West Texas town of Pinto Canyon, but spanning much of the East Coast and over half a century, Parker’s novel explores what it means to love, lose, and find forgiveness, all from the driver’s seat of a sky-blue 1983 Buick Electra. Fellow North Carolina author Randall Kenan once noted, “Michael Parker knows everything about the human heart.”11 After reading Parker’s breathtaking and sensual new novel, I find it difficult to contest Kenan’s statement. All I Have in This World revolves around three principal characters. The first is Marcus, a man haunted by his personal and financial failures, who becomes a transient wanderer following the foreclosure of his beloved North Carolina
carnivorous plant sanctuary. Reeling with self-loathing from the loss, Marcus meanders southward, vaguely in search of freedom in Mexico. In Texas, he encounters Maria, a lonely West Coast transplant who returns to her small Texas hometown in order to wrestle with questions about her adolescence and confront the lingering fallout over her high school boyfriend’s suicide. During her subsequent stay she decides to put her culinary talents to use by opening a farm-to-table restaurant. Maria’s aspirations of restauranteering intersect with Marcus’s need for a car when the two unceremoniously meet on a used car lot called Amazing Deals!. Here, Parker introduces readers to the novel’s most compelling character – the aforementioned sky-blue Buick Electra, a car so well-made and curvaceous that one of its more religious owners sells the thing out of fear that it will lead him toward impure thoughts. Through a series of flashback vignettes, we learn about this hulking land-yacht’s previous owners and how it finds its way into the hands of Maria and Marcus, who decide on a whim to share joint custody of the car. As he did in his most recent novel, The Watery Part of the World (2011; reviewed in NCLR Online 2012), Parker weaves his narrative lines in order to give his new novel a scope as vast as the
Randall Kenan, “Publication Day: The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker,” Algonquin Books Blog 26 Apr. 2011: web.
ABOVE LEFT AND RIGHT Michael Parker
PRESENT-TENSE DRIFTERS a review by Jim Coby Michael Parker. All I Have in This World: A Novel. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2014.
A native of Guntersville, AL, JIM COBY is a PhD student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His studies primarily focus on Southern literature and culture, and he has presented at regional and national conferences on subjects ranging from the music of the Drive-By Truckers to the Mardi Gras Indians. His dissertation examines the effect of meteorological abnormalities in novels by William Faulkner, Barry Hannah, and Jesmyn Ward. MICHAEL PARKER is a Professor of creative writing at UNC Greensboro who now divides his time between his native North Carolina and Austin, TX. NCLR has published several of his essays over the years and an interview with him in 2005. Read more about this author in the story about one of his most recent honors, the R. Hunt Parker Award, in NCLR Online 2012. Parker will be the honoree of the 2015 North Carolina Writers Conference in Washington, NC, in July.
1
reading from and signing his new novel at UNC Greensboro, 20 March 2014