Here To Get My Baby Out Of Jail (1983) by Louise Shivers

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Here To Get My Baby Out Of Jail (1983)

by Louise Shivers

Tarborough, North Carolina

North Carolina: 5/20

   Here To Get My Baby Out Of Jail is another win for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America: A regional work of fiction by a little-known author who I would have never read but for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  There's not much online about her- a stub-like Wikipedia page that mentions this book was named best first novel of the year by USA Today in 1983(!) and was made into  a movie in 1987, Summer Heat.   Her New York Times obituary noted the surprise success of this book- which was published when she was 53.

  Reviewers at the time compared her writing style to Flannery O'Connor, and author Mary Gordon had a role to play as well- selecting the manuscript out of a prize competition where she was the judge and sending it to her publisher.   The plot can be described in one line: Rural wife of a farmer has an affair with a hired hand with violent and predictable results, but like many books set in the rural south, it is all about the atmosphere.  The hot days, the sultry nights and the desperate need to escape- if not to another place then to another person, both themes that are active in this book.