From Publishers Weekly
Truman Capote remains the avatar of white-trash sentimentality, but what his imitators often neglect is how he transformed the leaden yearnings of the low-born Southern classes into literary gold. Hollis's first novel is Tru plus technicolor-and it's not a pretty sight. Raylene Stout claims to be a hot-blooded Louisiana belle, but she's really a sort of Daisy Duke retread of Candide, slipping away from the Bible Belt toward a reckoning with destiny. After shooting and wounding her husband, Buck, Raylene hits the road and eventually lands a job in a circus, getting shot out of a cannon. She falls in with a passel of circus trash, loses her heart to hunky Armando the Aerialist, feuds with 850-pound Alice from Dallas and ends up being kidnapped by the odious Human Corkscrew, who drags her to San Francisco. Escaping, Raylene meets up with Jamie, her post-op transsexual cousin, who introduces the latter-day Alice into her tribe, which includes drag-queen Aquanette and a houseful of Hispanic "bachelors." When Raylene contacts husband Buck, the narrative, which has been divided between Raylene and Jamie's separate adventures, begins to coalesce, but continues to walk on the wild side. This underclass picaresque is wanting something more than Raylene's charm and Jamie's audacity-some more judicious editing, perhaps-to keep the pages flipping.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Lake Gladys, Louisiana ("at night the lemony smell of magnolia blossoms can break your heart provided you're far enough away from the shrimp factory" ), is home to Raylene Arceneaux (later Stout, as in stout-hearted), her cousin Jamie (later Dagmar) Clayton, televangelist Dr. Leroy Lazarus, and his smarmy wife. When her cheatin' husband takes up with Mrs. Lazarus, Raylene shoots him, hits the road, meets psychic Carlotta, and becomes shot-from-the-cannon fodder for a small-time circus. Traveling across the Great Plains, Raylene ponders life with a sexy fat lady, a bearded lady, and Carlotta and falls in love with an Italian aerialist. Meanwhile, cousin Jamie offers a parallel narrative of life in San Francisco, where he rents floor space overnight to illegal immigrants and has a sex-change operation. Then Raylene is kidnapped by the Human Pretzel and taken to S.F.; she escapes, stumbles into a transvestite bar, and is reunited with Jamie/Dagmar. Half of Lake Gladys eventually treks west, and all receive their just deserts. An antic but affecting first novel by a talented, recently deceased writer. Mary Carroll
From Kirkus Reviews
The first--and regrettably last--novel from an immensely talented, innovative writer who died at the end of October 1995. Raylene Stout and her cousin Jamie, whose mothers are identical twins, are inseparable best friends in small-town Lake Gladys, Louisiana. Not long after their mothers'--and Raylene's high-school sweetheart Nick's--suicides, Jamie disappears one night, leaving no forwarding address. Raylene ends up despondent in Arkansas, married to the dim-witted Buck, but when Buck cheats on her with Shirley Jack, an aerobics instructor/televangelist's wife and Raylene's former high-school classmate and rival, Raylene follows Jamie's example and runs away herself. On her Odyssey-like journey, she meets Carlotta--whose strength (and psychic powers) are in her floor-length hair--and ultimately joins the circus, where she becomes a human cannonball and falls in love. Armando, the object of her affections, is an acrobat who may or may not love her for the fortune he thinks is hers; meantime, Raylene is offered a variety of life lessons from other circus folk, including the 800-pound Alice from Dallas, who dies in the throes of passion. When Poncho the human pretzel kidnaps Raylene (he's also under the delusion that she's secretly rich) and takes her to San Francisco, she is finally reunited with Jamie and thrust into the midst of a world of transvestites and transsexuals. Her cousin is still the same old guy, except that he's no longer a he, but what eventually befalls Buck, Carlotta, Jamie, Armando, and even Shirley Jack, following Raylene's journey from Lake Gladys to Graceland to the Midwest and on to the Mission District, will come as a greater surprise than even Jamie's dramatic transformation. What Raylene- -and the reader--takes away from these wild and woolly adventures is the conviction that one can finally count only on oneself. An imaginative, skillfully rendered story, as wise and insightful as it is entertaining. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
