cover image Lovesong for the Giant Contessa

Lovesong for the Giant Contessa

Steven Tye Culbert. Four Walls Eight Windows, $20 (224pp) ISBN 978-1-56858-082-1

A hyper-surreal coming-of-age novel, Culbert's third effort (after The Beautiful Woman without Mercy and The King of the Scarecrows) is an addled micro-travelogue of decrepit small-town life on the sweltering Gulf of Mexico in the early 1960s. Narrator Will Bell is a 15-year-old dreamer who is ambivalent both about where he has come from and where he is going. With his best friend, Chet, he simply drifts in that hazy halfworld between childhood and adulthood, fixating on a local legend, the nearly mythological figure of the Giant Contessa. It's impossible to conclude whether she is a spiritual guide or merely the offspring of ""a normal schoolteacher mom who made a mistake."" She is Will's fixation, and his glimpse of her provokes a freakish parade of extras, the whole weird population of a place trapped in time and captured in crisp, noirish details that lend an air of authority to an essentially plotless tale that is more about the inscrutability of emotional mysteries than the solving of an explicit one, in this case a grisly murder documented by photos that fall into Will's hands. Culbert's empathy for the dreary poetry of simple human struggle is perfectly pitched, but the novel's flaws are many: the biggest is that it's often impossible to tell what's going on. Seemingly aiming for a native Texan brand of magical realism, Culbert sometimes ends up with an incoherent babble shot through with bleak humor.(June)