Smith, C. W

New York. 1975. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1st Printing. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0374130302. 305 pages. hardcover. . keywords: Literature America Texas. FROM THE PUBLISHER - COUNTRY MUSIC opens when Bobby Joe Gilbert, Hedorville's Bane to Virgins and Most Unlikely to Succeed, confronts an unwelcome question: ‘What are you going to do with yourself?' He is desperate to escape the chains thrown around him by his reputation, by his self-image, and by the limitations of his world. But the bonds are strong. A brief college career dissipates in endless games of pinball and a stormy friendship with Polly, a Lesbian pinball addict who resists his sexual advances and penetrates his psychic defenses. He takes a wife, a gorgeous blonde who epitomizes his macho notions of womanhood - values he is afraid to question - but the marriage is doomed by her willful childishness and his inability to cope with the intricacies of love and sharing. Warily, he returns to Hedorville, to Heavy and Lonnie and Rabbit, to Jackie Gayle and Nelda Sue, the old crowd that cannot see beyond their stifling universe of drive-in restaurants and beer and pinball - and also to his responsibility for the death of a girl who trusted him, the ugly secret in his past which he will have to face before he can turn to the future. Bobby Joe, an explosive mixture of innocence and hostility who nevertheless commands our sympathy, is a remarkably drawn character, one of the many who give Country Music its extraordinary vitality. The women in his life - Pinball Polly, his wife Ginger, and Nelda Sue, the girl he keeps leaving and keeps coming back to - are three of the most deftly created women in recent fiction. Together they and a host of others bring a world to life, while its creator rings changes on the themes of sex, destiny, escape, and the complexity and passion of human entanglements. inventory #23251 ISBN: 0374130302.