Clyde Edgerton: Vietnam Vet, Jet Pilot, and . . . Small Town Housewife

Clyde Edgerton Vietnam Vet, Jet Pilot, and . . . Small Town Housewifefew men be possessed of attempted to write using a womans persona. Those who do choose to use the persona of a woman often bolt out in their effort, creating a character who does not quite sound authentic. Critics ordinarily note the authors inadequacies and point out difficulties when an author tries to capture the voice of a person of the opposite gender. One exception is Clyde Edgerton in his first novel, Raney. The voice of Raney seems genuine and Edgerton received great acclaim for his novel. Public acceptance of Edgerton utterance as a young woman may be attributed to a number of factors involving the attitudes of the author, of the character, and of critics.Those who have interviewed Edgerton and reviewed his books are nearly all men. The one noted exception is author Barbara Kingsolver, who reviewed The Floatplane Notebooks in the New York Times disk Review. Not only does she neglect to take Edgerton to task for his use of a woman narrator in part of that novel, but she praises him generously and compares him to Jane Austen. Kingsolver manifestly feels Edgerton can speak creditably as a woman, and she goes so distant as to feel he is worthy to keep company with highly respected woman authors.Another consideration may be that close critics have not yet found Edgerton. Raney was his first novel and he has not written another entirely from a womans point of view. His later works usually rotate among a large-scale number of narrators, from a delinquent teenage boy to a wisteria vine in a family cemetery to a determined dog. If he had persisted in focusing upon women narrators as he became better known, he might have attracted more attention for that aspect of his work.... ...ete with blind spots and inconsistencies, and so is her phallic counterpart, Charles, who just might flush a cabbage core strike down the toilet, causing expensive plumbing problems. No one individual or gender is portrayed as perfection all the characters are aroma their way down lifes corridors. That seems to make Raney a good example of the homosexual race rather than a representative of a gender issue. workings CitedEdgerton, Clyde. Raney. New York Ballantine, 1985.Kingsolver, Barbara. The Floatplane Notebooks. Rev. of The Floatplane Notebooks by Clyde Edgerton. New York Times intensity Review. 9 Oct. 198810.Kozikowski, Thomas. Clyde Edgerton. Contemporary Authors. Ed. Susan Trotsky. Vol. 134. Detroit Dale Research, 1992.Robbins, Kenn. A Conversation with Clyde Edgerton. The Southern Quarterly A Journal of the Arts in the South. 30.1 (1991) 58-69.