Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men Trade cloth - 2000

Details

• Title Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men
• Author Powell, Padgett
• Binding Trade Cloth
• Edition First Edition
• Pages 148
• Language EN
• Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston
• Date 2000-11-20
• ISBN 9780618071685

Mrs. Hollingsworth likes to traipse. Her primary worry is thinning hair, though this has not happened yet. She enjoys a solidarity with fruit. She is wistful for the era in which hatboxes proliferated, though a hatbox is not something even her grandmother may have owned. More probably what she wants is hatboxes themselves, without the era or the hats. But the proud, firm utility of the hatbox requires a hat and an era for its dignity; otherwise it is a relic. She does not want relics. Her husband is indistinct. She regards friendly dogs with suspicion. Her daughters have lost touch with her, or she with them, or both; it is the same thing, she thinks, or it is not the same thing, which means it might as well be the same thing: so much is pointless this way, indifferent, moot, or mute, as a friend of hers says. Not a friend, but a friendly man whom she cannot bring herself to correct when he says “mute” for “moot,” for then she might have to go on and indict his entire presumption to teach at the community college, inspiring roomfuls of college hopefuls to say “mute” for “moot” and filling them with other malaprops, and if she indicts him on that presumption she’ll need to go on and indict him for the presumption of his smug liberalism and for affecting to like film as Art and not movies as entertainment and for getting his political grooming from the smug liberalism and film-as-Art throat clearing of National Public Radio, and all of this, since it would be but the first strike in taking on the entire army of modest Americans who believe themselves superior to other Americans (but not to any foreigners, except dictators) mostly by virtue of doing nothing but electing to think themselves superior - all of this would be unwise, or moot, and indeed she may as well be mute, maybe the oaf was on to something.

Copyright © 2000 by Padgett Powell

“When asked for a list of the best American writers of the younger generation I invariably put the name of Padgett Powell at the top.” -- Saul Bellow

"Padgett Powell takes big risks, and he wins every time." --Josephine Humphreys

"Nobody else talks to you like this." --Pete Dexter

"an admirably sentimental affirmation of creativity and the possibility of love." The San Francisco Chronicle