Book review, This Is What It Smells Like

I have written this review for Cathy Adams' new novel. I hope people read her book.

This Is What It Smells Like

by Cathy Adams

A Review

               This recently published first novel by Cathy Adams is a delightful read, filled with the best traditions of Southern Gothic fiction. The novel’s quirky, interesting characters lead lives which run the gamut from wacky to profound.

               The protagonist Valentine must come to terms with her past and with her family when her estranged father Ray and his step son Luis return to North Carolina so that Ray can die there. Val’s mother Tess, a delightful free spirit, must deal with her ex-husband and their own past. Tess is the catalyst for some of the novel’s most interesting misadventures. Valentine must deal with a dying father, her father’s step son, and her wacky mother as she learns the secrets of her own past. As the title implies, Val is gifted with an unusual sense of smell which gives her unique insights into the personalities and emotions of those around her. Adams conveys this olfactory sense effectively, especially since our language has comparatively few words that relate to smells.

               The Southern Gothic elements of the book seem to reflect influences from William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Erskine Caldwell. the multiple first-person perspectives are reminiscent of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, though this novel is more accessible. The religious elements of the novel, especially those revolving around the Catholic Church, recall some of O’Connor’s fiction. And finally the delightfully macabre sense of humor may reflect the influence Caldwell’s novels such as Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre.

               Overall, This Is What It Smells Like is an entertaining and sometimes profound book. It will leave the reader with a thoughtful smile, wishing for more.

My New Novel's Prologue

This is an early draft of the prologue of my novel, Memoirs of a Capital Eye. The novel will be a fictionalized version of my life and philosophical journey.

Memoirs of a Capital Eye, a Novel

Robert C. Covel

PROLOGUE

            Our lives and our perspectives on the universe are controlled by a capital I.  The first-person singular personal pronoun is the only one granted the status of being a capital letter. That peculiar fact demonstrates our world view, as we place ourselves at the center of our cosmos. Psychologically, we are still living in a Ptolemaic universe, which may not be geocentric, but which is certainly egocentric.  Someone observed that each of us is the protagonist of our own story. We see ourselves as the epic hero engaging in the quest for self-determination and meaning. Writers in particular are exceptionally egotistical. As a group, we believe that not only are our perceptions of the world, our thoughts, feelings, and actions, worthy of being recorded in some form; but we also believe that other people wish to share in our lives, and that somehow we believe that our art will help others to make sense of their own lives.

            I think of the number of modern writers who use the personal perspective. Emerson’s emphasis on self-reliance, Thoreau’s account of his own sojourn at Walden, Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Melville’s Ishmael narrator—the Romantics began the self-absorption that continues into the modern period.

            I at least am aware of the limitations of my point of view. I know that the very attempt to measure or perceive reality distorts what it purports to measure, like trying to measure a spider web with a ruler. There is no objective reality: there is only subjective interpretation of the fragile tissue of truth.

            I’m not sure when I first became aware of the uncertainty of life. Obviously that awareness preceded my learning about Heisenberg or chaos theory, and long before I had studied philosophy. I have viewed my childhood (like that of most children, at least those with some stability in their lives) was through the golden Edenic lens of innocence. My earliest memories (beginning from age four) are dominated by fragmented images of events, all of which seemed serene. I remember the small house (I could still remember the floor plan), and I can remember events that any child would regard as significant: Christmas trees and gifts, birthday parties, and television programs on the small black and white screen.

            My childish memories of my parents are snippets of sensory images: the smell of my mother’s perfume and the feel of her rabbit fur coat against my cheek; the taste of Beeman’s gum that my father brought home on payday and the feel of my father’s rough hands and the smell of his beery breath when he picked me up from the floor to toss me in the air.

            Perhaps my first intimation of insecurity of life is the memory of the day of our move from Pittsburgh to Marienville. I have some small image of eating cereal from a bowl with the picture of the Sugar Crisp bear on the side. The memory includes stacks of cardboard boxes filling the kitchen around me. Perhaps I was aware, on some juvenile level, of the transience of human life. Or that may be just the projection of the adult memory.  

While I cannot not recall the actual emigration to the new house in Marienville, I do recall standing in the new empty house, aware of the darkness and cold as we entered the living room. Perhaps the darkness and cold were omens of my new life, though at that moment I was probably only aware of the physical discomfort and the immediate anxiety attached to the new environment. Such juvenile memories from so long ago are completely unreliable, clouded as they are when filtered through the events that occur afterwards. The eye of memory does not see clearly or objectively, after all.