Padgett Powell : Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men

At her kitchen table somewhere in the South, Padgett Powell's narrator embarks on a spirited and often hilarious imagining of certain historical figures and current national preoccupations. Ostensibly writing her grocery list, Mrs. Hollingsworth most happily loses her sense of herself. Her list becomes a discovery of the things she has and those she lacks, including men -- even her own husband.
Mrs. Hollingsworth begins her list by imagining a lost-love story in which she is playful with and disdainful of the conventions of Southern literature. Soon tiring of that, she decides to turn up her imagination. For reasons unclear to her, the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, an icon of the Lost Cause, rides into her tired lost-love story. He appears as a hologram created by a media giant, Roopit Mogul, who aims to find the real New Southerner -- in a man who can recognize General Forrest's image. Into this surreal atmosphere enter Mrs. Hollingsworth's all too real daughters, the forgotten husband, Mr. and Mrs. Mogul, the boys of the neighborhood, and petty criminals named Oswald and Bundy. Within this singular narrative collage, strong tenderness arises, with accounts of genuine lost love, both familial and wholly romantic. MRS HOLLINGSWORTH'S MEN is a remarkable achievement, full of style and feeling.

Amazon.com Review
Somewhere in the modern-day South a 50-year-old housewife sits down to write a grocery list, but what flows from her pen is a vignette of lost love and betrayal involving an intellectual mule, burning currency, old love letters, and an absconding husband. Fueled somehow by linguistic purity and the fad of sagging pants, the heroine of Padgett Powell's fourth novel, Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men, laments the ignorant confusion between moot and mute and longs to pour Drano down the crack of a plumber's "ass when he exposed it to her, as he invariably would." What ensues may be evidence of a psychotic break or the work of an inspired rube as Mrs. Hollingsworth gets the hang of the novelistic process. But whatever it is, it incorporates high spirits, irreverence, and imagination.

Addicted to her list, Mrs. Hollingsworth is surprised by the appearance of characters she didn't summon and the bizarre mixture of historical fact and modern culture that unfolds unbidden. The novel within the novel involves a couple of operatives named Bundy and Oswald who have been hired by someone named Roopit Mogul (get it?) to find a candidate for a eugenics experiment designed to engineer "the New Southerner." The candidate will be recognizable by his ability to see a hologram of the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest that Oswald and Bundy project by means of a sort of ray gun. Not having an operator's manual for this gizmo, the bumbling duo inexpertly conjures the flamboyant soldier in surreally unlikely situations. The candidate who is able to see the hologram turns out to be a mentally unbalanced homeless person carrying around a whole load of guilt over disappointing, at one point, his father and his football coach. Helen of Troy makes an appearance too, bathed in golden light along with schools of exotic fish. Things are probably (perbly in Powell's lexicon) getting a little out of hand.