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The Cooter Farm
Synopsis
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Jones’s blackly humorous first novel, set on the Cooter family’s failing dairy farm in New York State, is firmly grounded in the gothic tradition. Wryly narrated by 10-year-old Ollie Cooter, it blends frequent hilarity, startling violence and a gripping plot. Ollie’s uncles, coarse rednecks nicknamed Hooter and Looter, are keeping their senile father’s farm afloat while Ollie’s hypochondriac dad Scooter is a traveling peddler of top-notch bull semen. Their jaded 13-year-old sister Mary Jean, Ollie’s aunt, is his constant companion; with her, Ollie confusedly notices the symptoms of sexual awakening. Fear and evil soon engulf the Cooter farm: Scooter’s imagined maladies and refusal to defend himself against Hooter’s relentless jibes alienate his wife; Hooter is incestuous, adulterous and homicidal; Mary Jean discovers “The Power,” a malevolent force that inhabits an abandoned house, and enlists Ollie’s help in releasing it with instructions to kill Hooter. Mary Jean and Ollie’s helplessness, Hooter’s lack of remorse and the suffering wrought by The Power–perhaps ghost, perhaps defense mechanism–arouse childhood angst and terror in this alternately amusing and tragic coming-of-age tale. Publishers Weekly |
Praise
“The Cooter Farm will remind readers of John Irving one minute, Joyce Carol Oates the next. An altogether remarkable debut.”
“Dickens and Irving are high standards against which to measure any novel, let alone a debut. It’s a tribute to The Cooter Farm that those are exactly the comparisons it invokes.”
“‘The Cooter Farm‘ is a novel that defies categorization. It brings together elements as diverse as the black humor of Flannery O’Connor, the rude hilarity of Kurt Vonnegut, and the nostalgia for childhood of Harper Lee. A truly amazing first novel.”
“At once a poignant coming-of-age-tale liberally laced with gothic overtones and a serious consideration of social issues with a hint of absurdity that smacks of James Thurber…this is a bold first novel that promises a great future for a bright young writer.”
“The Cooter Farm is a stunning novel, first or otherwise. I read it in one long gulp, scarcely pausing to breathe. It seems to me Matthew Jones brings the Southern Gothic tradition to rural New York with his powerful storytelling ability, his ferocious humor, and his poignant pity for a family and a way of life in the process of self-destruction, or perhaps, more optimistically, self transformation.”
“The Cooter Farm is a tale that suffers in the summation. In the original, it is a book filled with characters so realistically drawn they threaten to jump off the page. Rarely is a first effort so powerfully and compellingly written, so ambitious in its scope and so successful in living up to its ambition.”
“The Cooter Farm” is a fantastically original and accomplished first novel.
Matthew F. Jones is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels as well as a number of screenplays. His novels have been widely translated and several times have been named on best novels of the year lists. Three of his novels, A Single Shot, Deepwater and Boot Tracks, have been made into major motion pictures. He has taught creative writing at a number of colleges and universities, including Randolph Macon College, Lynchburg College and the University of Virginia. He grew up on a horse and dairy farm in rural upstate New York and currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Other Books
Boot Tracks
Boot Tracks is a commanding tale of a man and a woman struggling against a destiny they cannot control, told in Matthew F. Jones’ characteristically taut, economic style. An assassination gone terribly wrong; a couple searching for one last chance to find a safe place in a hostile world.
A Single Shot
After the loss of his family farm, John Moon is a desperate man. A master hunter, his ability to poach game in-season or out is the only thing that stands between him and the soup kitchen line. Until Moon trespasses on the wrong land, hears a rustle in the brush, and fires a single fateful shot.
The Elements of Hitting
Walter Innis, son of a frustrated and violent fallen baseball star and a tragically unhappy woman driven to infidelity, carries his family’s legacy of torment into his own adult life – with disastrous results. Ultimately, it is as a Little League coach that Walter discovers a route to happiness and hope beyond the reach of the past.