cover image Dairy Queen Days

Dairy Queen Days

Robert Inman. Little Brown and Company, $21.45 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-316-41873-7

A passive protagonist and a bloodless story line make this third novel by Inman (Old Dogs and Children) a sluggish affair. Trout Moseley turns 16 in 1979, just as his mother heads for a mental institution and his father, a preacher, starts wrestling with his beliefs. Father and son retreat to the small Georgia hometown founded, named after and still dominated by their clan. There, Trout discovers a heavy ancestral burden and feels the need to right his family's past wrongs: ""He could see that he was a product of a great aching history.... People with mills and trucks and money and power over other people's lives."" Unfortunately, he does little besides rehash and bemoan his situation. The family's prominence--""When a Moseley farts, everybody smells it""--isn't convincingly established, and Trout's inherited moral responsibility for a town, even a failing one, doesn't come across as a compelling challenge. Inman's talent for natural dialogue and astute local coloring remains intact here, but it would have been put to better use in a story with a clearer, more dramatic conflict. Author tour. (Mar.)