In Memory of Junior (1992) by Clyde Edgergton

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

In Memory of Junior (1992)

by Clyde Edgergton

Summerlin, North Carolina

North Carolina: 14/20

    Another day, another Southern writer I'd never heard of before I started the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  He certainly isn't obscure, with a decades long track record of having his books reviewed by the New York Times and a prominent position teaching creative writing at a regional university in North Carolina.  The Times called this book "a shaggy cemetery story narrated by the 21 most interested parties."  I kind of groaned to myself when I saw that this small, 215 page book came with its own family tree in front a la a 900 page Russian novel, but it wasn't especially difficult to follow because none of these 20 characters do anything in this book except plot and scheme over the burial location of some family members.

   There is also a minor, unresolved struggle based on an inheritance that will flow based on the death order of an elderly couple.  In Memory of Junior was very much one of those books on the 1,001 Novels list where I just didn't care what happened in the book, didn't care about any of the characters and didn't find the milieu/setting interesting in anyway.   I did appreciate the literary technique expressed by cramming 20 narrators into 215 pages- which is a technique that George Saunders wrote all the way to a major literary award in recent years (Lincoln in the Bardo) but that book was about Lincoln and a bunch of ghosts, and this is about a bunch of redneck southerners who have nothing going on (except for the one family member who is a lawyer in Charlotte.)