VISITS FROM THE DROWNED GIRL

The fictional North Carolina-ish town of Buffalo Shoals is a microcosm of the New South—a yuppified university district with a pretentious art scene and alternative newspaper, surrounded by a white trash hinterland where people have names like Doodle and Jeeter and the Pentecostal church sits next to the Triple-X Drive-In. Sherrill explored this terrain in his well-received The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break , and in this funny, bleak and poetic novel he again invests it with a mythic resonance. The story unfolds through the eyes of broadcast tower repairman Benny Poteat, resigned to his feckless blue-collar life until one day he sees a woman set up a video camera and then drown herself in a rain-swollen river. Ashamed of his own passivity in the face of tragedy, Benny becomes obsessed with the enigmatic videotapes she left behind on the riverbank. As he delves into her life, the woman—a preacher's daughter turned avant-garde video artiste—becomes an embodiment of the social contradictions of Buffalo Shoals and a touchstone for Benny's own lonely sense of being an ineffectual observer of life. Sherrill paints a wryly humorous, bawdy, scatological panorama of Southern culture, full of kitsch and color but suffused with a hangdog irony. More than that, his limpid, naturalistic prose, woven with symbolic structure and philosophical insinuation, conveys a subtly convincing sense of the enervating voyeurism of modern life. Agent, Simon Lipskar at Writers House . (June 8)

Forecast: The college town setting and brainy outsider perspective make this an especially good pick for campus bookstores. 10-city author tour.