The Bible Salesman
Clyde Edgerton
Reviewed by Kathleen George
Henry Dampier, the hero of Clyde Edgerton’s latest work, THE BIBLE SALESMAN, is twenty-years old, smart and dumb, religious and cannily carnal; he spends a lot of time examining and thinking about scripture. He questions the varied versions of Bible stories within the good book itself, but thinks nothing of scamming the system to make a living selling Bibles. He’s the flawed hedonistic selfish kind faithful doubting human being Christianity is all about.
Henry is hitchhiking one day, hoping to get on the road to sell more Bibles (he gets them free, cuts out the donor information, and goes door to door). He is offered a ride by Preston Clearwater, a dashing man who looks quite a bit like Clark Gable. Clearwater appears to have a lot going for him—money in his pocket and an easy manner, not to mention a car. When he finds out Henry can drive, he offers him a job. Henry, he explains, will be driving cars here and there, getting them repainted along the way. Then Clearwater will meet up with him, trade cars for a few hours; they’ll have a meal together, stay at a hotel, get on the road, pick up another car, etc.
Another Henry might be suspicious right off about this new job, but this one buys the story that Preston is a G-man and that the two of them are part of a large undercover operation taking illegal earnings from criminals. It is Henry’s dearest hope that he will do well enough to make the FBI take notice and offer him a permanent position.
Edgerton breaks from the foreground story for a significant amount of background on Henry. The boy’s father was killed in a freak accident, bashed by a piece of lumber hanging off a truck. Then his mother who wasn’t coping well at all dumped him and his sister on relatives and left, never to be seen again. The relatives are colorful Edgerton types—full of religion, country cooking, and rationalizations for their bad behaviors. And there are neighbors, too,who fill out the comic tapestry. Mrs. Albright has a houseful of talking cats with such names as Angel, Judas, and Mary Magdalene. It doesn’t take long to figure out that Mrs. A throws her voice. But what the cats have to say is surprising.
Because Preston Clearwater’s crimes are not limited to stealing cars, this novel is darker than some of Edgerton’s others. The crimes get worse and worse—or at least our knowledge of them does. Henry’s gullibility is terrifying. All the while he’s doing Clearwater’s bidding, he’s also pursuing ongoing life—sex, love, romance—in the person of Marleen Green who works a fruit stand. Will he live long enough to kiss her? Will he end up in jail or dead before he’s ever tasted life? Would he ever have met her at all had he not tried to do two jobs at once—the lucky Bible selling job, the lucky car-transfer job.
As always, Edgerton (RANEY, LUNCH AT THE PICCADILLY, WALKING ACROSS EGYPT) makes you care about his people and he invites you to have a good laugh at the same time.
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About the Reviewer:
Kathleen George is a professor of theatre at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of the novels TAKEN, FALLEN, and most recently AFTERIMAGE. TAKEN, translated into six languages, has been described as “a thinking person’s thriller,” FALLEN as “an absolute page-turner,” and AFTERIMAGE as “an excellent procedural” and “a true literary pleasure.”
She lives in the city of Pittsburgh with her husband, writer Hilary Masters, and sets her scenes in the rough neighborhoods and the upscale neighborhoods, in the parks and restaurants, in places fictional and real. Years of directing plays, she says, led her to fashion dramatic scenes with psychological subtexts. Her agent pointed out that her characters are always eating. That observation led to “A Cop's Culinary Tour of Pittsburgh,” a segment of her website, www.kathleengeorgebooks.com.
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