Trick or Treat (Criticism)

Criticism

Carol Ullmann

Ullmann is a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, she examines the southern Gothic elements in Powell's short story.

"Trick or Treat," by Padgett Powell, belongs to the southern Gothic subgenre of fiction. Southern Gothic is an offshoot of Gothic literature which is a genre that uses weird or supernatural elements in a story that examines social issues. Gothic is a type of romantic literature and borrows heavily from romanticism. Southern Gothic uses Gothic elements in conjunction with issues peculiar to the southern United States. The South has its own regional identity comprised of shared history, mythology, food traditions, and dialect. Predecessors to Powell in the southern Gothic subgenre include Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee, and Eudora Welty — to name only a few. Powell uses Gothic elements in his story to raise it above the ordinary. Instead of being a simple tale of adolescent sexuality and mid-life disillusionment, "Trick or Treat" is a story of more mythic proportions, replete with talking pumpkins heads, adulterous lemonade, and costumed housewives walking to and from the grocery store.

Characters in Gothic stories exhibit a combination of sympathetic and grotesque elements such that the reader is intrigued but uncomfortable. "Trick or Treat" offers a glimpse into the life of a happily married but enraged housewife, Mrs. Hollingsworth. She both loves and hates the South. She is bored; she is lonely despite having a family. To counter her ennui, Mrs. Hollingsworth dresses strangely and talks to herself while she walks. The finishing Gothic touch on this character is her justification for entering into a sexual relationship with a twelve-year-old boy, supposedly as a way to save her sanity. Insane women are also a common feature in Gothic stories.

She was toying with the idea of losing herself. She did not want her mind to depart she wanted the little craft of things that were considered her, that she considered her, to get loose and drift and turn just a little off-line.

Like Mrs. Hollingsworth, her young suitor Jimmy Teeth also combines the normal and the weird. It is not unusual for him, at twelve years old, to feel aroused around women whom he finds attractive; however, it is unusual for him to pursue a relationship with someone outside his age group, especially a woman old enough to be his mother. In the course of the story, Jimmy never mentions his mother although he does talk about his father and brother. Jimmy's mother may be missing from his life, either dead or absent, therefore complicating the reasons for Jimmy's interest in Mrs. Hollingsworth.

Jimmy's intense emotions and unusual, even absurd, behavior are components of a Gothic story. Another mark of absurdity is Jimmy's luck at stealing the lawnmower, leaping the six-foot fence to escape the police, and finally getting Mrs. Hollingsworth alone on Halloween night. He is a mixture of maturity and innocence, working hard to sell himself as old enough to be worth Mrs. Hollingsworth's notice. At the very end of "Trick or Treat," Mrs. Hollingsworth asks Jimmy if he still goes trick-or-treating. "No'm, I quit that," an answer which satisfies Mrs. Hollingsworth, as if giving up trick- or-treating were a measurable milestone for maturity. When they exchange names, Mrs. Hollingsworth is struck by Jimmy's strange last name, Teeth, concluding that it is too weird to be made up. Jimmy's last name, Teeth, is another grotesque component. The name conveys images that are both sensual and aggressive.

Gothic stories seek to establish a certain atmosphere — brooding, ruined, lonely — which Mrs. Hollingsworth invokes at the beginning of the story while she ponders her love for the South, and its love for her. "Trick or Treat" is set in the southern United States just before and on Halloween. Halloween is the perfect time of year for a Gothic story because of its natural associations with the grotesque and morbid, a time when Gothic motifs are commonly used. The fact that Mrs. Hollingsworth and Jimmy finally commit to going ahead with their relationship on Halloween night is no coincidence. The southern setting enhances the Gothic character of Powell's story. Jimmy, still unclear about the regional history, asks Mrs. Hollingsworth what she means by the "south."

"This," Mrs. Hollingsworth said, indicating with her arm the trees and air and houses and suspiring history and ennui and corruption and meanness and bottomland and chivalric humanism and people who are smart about money and people who don't have a clue and heroism and stray pets around them.

The arrival of Jimmy Teeth in Mrs. Hollingsworth's life is just the sort of grotesque event one can expect in a southern Gothic story. Her first, unnerving description of him is of "an uncarved, unlit pumpkin" peering over a picket fence and talking to her. The pumpkin head may be an allusion to Washington Irving's short story, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," a frightening American Gothic tale of a headless horseman who uses a pumpkin in place of his missing head. The pumpkin head also alludes to a jack-o'-lantern, which is a pumpkin that has been hollowed out, carved with a face, lit with a candle, and thus temporarily given an impression of life.

Jimmy later calls Mrs. Hollingsworth "Bonnie" and refers to himself as "Clyde," a reference to infamous criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow who were in love and lived life on the run as they robbed their way across the Texas countryside in the 1930s. Bonnie and Clyde are tragic, romantic figures, who pursued lives of love and revenge that eventually killed them. This reference, therefore, casts Mrs. Hollingsworth and Jimmy as larger than life and destined for each other. Jimmy is also referred to as "Lolito," a reference to Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, a tragic and comic story about an older man sexually obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl. Jimmy is Mrs. Hollingsworth's Lolito, and, as in Nabokov's novel, Powell has infused his story with as much potential for comedy as calamity.

The absurd and disturbing subject matter further defines Powell's story as Gothic. The most disturbing element of "Trick or Treat" is the sexual relationship that develops between Mrs. Hollingsworth and Jimmy Teeth. "It was hysterical, she was hysterical, it was perfect." In western culture it is not as common for younger men to date older women as it is for younger women to date older men; however, the twenty-five year disparity in their ages is the least upsetting aspect. No matter how she tries to justify the relationship or how mature and confident Jimmy behaves, if Mrs. Hollingsworth has sex with Jimmy she will have committed statutory rape. Even though Jimmy is consenting, the law denies him the ability to make the choice to consent until he is eighteen years of age. Legally and psychologically, Mrs. Hollingsworth is not considered a pedophile (an adult who is sexually attracted to children) but instead an ephebophile (an adult who is sexually attracted to adolescents). They are mutually exclusive terms. Mrs. Hollingsworth, loosened from the moorings of her safe and boring southern landing, lets herself drift out into these dark waters.

The excess of emotion and the dark themes of Powell's story mark it as a Gothic in a southern setting, resplendent with the absurd, the grotesque, and the psychologically disturbing. The characters of Mrs. Hollingsworth and Jimmy Teeth are at once familiar and yet twisted, discomforting. They turn to each other, as unlikely a pairing as they seem: a smart-mouthed youth and a well-educated housewife. For Mrs. Hollingsworth, this may just be the love that she has long sought from the South. For Jimmy, Mrs. Hollingsworth is both his conquest and his conqueror. Seeing no farther into their relationship than the first moment of its formation, the reader understands the Gothic tragedy of this story is the formation of that relationship itself.

Source: Carol Ullmann, Critical Essay on "Trick or Treat," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

Thomson Gale

In the following essay, the critic gives an overview of Padgett Powell's work.

Padgett Powell burst onto the literary scene in 1984 with his first novel, Edisto. A college chemistry major turned day-laborer and roofer, Powell nurtured his literary aspirations by reading American novelist William Faulkner's works in his spare time and eventually enrolled in the University of Houston's creative writing graduate program. In the words of Time critic R. Z. Sheppard, Edisto, which was adapted from Powell's master's thesis, showed that its author had "all the literary equipment for a new career: a peeled eye, a tuning-fork ear, and an innovative way with local color and regional dialect."

Critics have compared Powell's technique to that of the great U.S. regional writers, including Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, J. D. Salinger, Flannery O'Connor, and Faulkner. Although he has been influenced by the styles of past writers, Powell's mode of expression remains distinctive. Reviewing Edisto for the Washington Post Book World, Jonathan Yardley commented that much of the book is "so fresh and original; Padgett Powell clearly knows what he is doing, and he does it very well." In a piece for the New York Times Book Review, Ron Loewinsohn similarly praised Powell, calling him "an extravagantly talented writer."

Named for the predominantly black, rural, backwater section of undeveloped South Carolina coastline near what the narrator calls the "architect-conceived, Arab-financed" Hilton Head, Edisto is a young man's episodic account of his unusual coming of age. Simons (pronounced "Simmons") Manigault, the book's narrator, is a precocious, prepubescent twelve-year-old trapped in a seemingly incomprehensible world — that of adults. Simons's parents are separated and his college-professor mother, known among the local blacks as "the Duchess," has decided that her only son should be a writer.

Simons is no ordinary child. He is, stated Sheppard in Time, "one of the most engaging fictional small fry ever to cry thief: sly, pungent, lyric, funny, and unlikely to be forgotten." In a review in Newsweek, Peter Prescott pointed to the "great comic effect" the author manages in his treatment of Simons: Powell endows his protagonist with a sophisticated sort of innocence that is at once poignant and amusing.

In return for his pursuit of literary knowledge, Simons's mother gives him free reign to do virtually anything he pleases. Simons frequents the Baby Grand, a predominantly black local bar whose clientele has dubbed the youth something of a folk hero. Simons explains, "I am a celebrity because I'm white, not even teenage yet, and possess the partial aura of the Duchess." The Duchess's aura, however, is informed by her drinking and her promiscuity, both of which figure in her son's development.

It is not until Taurus, the Duchess's mysterious lover and Simons's substitute father, enters the story that the boy, in a sense, becomes a man. Sybil Estess, writing in Southwest Review, dubbed Taurus a "blessed intruder into [the] story," who teaches Simons how to live fully in the present. Taurus inspires in Simons the courage to move on without knowing what might happen in the future. "Something is happening, happening all the time," Simons learns, and a life in Edisto is not what lies ahead for the boy. Taurus's influence allows Simons to willingly accept the changes he is about to encounter. By the end of the novel, Simons's parents reunite and the family moves to the cardboard world of Hilton Head. Taurus, having fulfilled his role as teacher in the story, exits Simons's life as unexpectedly as he had entered it.

Powell's pages are filled with the symbolism, colorful characters, and precise vernacular of past regionalist giants, but the young writer, as pointed out by Jonathan Yardley in his review in Washington Post Book World, has added "a new twist, and a most agreeable one." Avoiding the trap of sentimentality, Powell addresses the highly developed and commercial "new" South of the 1980s, "finds it imperfect — but accepts it anyway." An air of honesty permeates the author's advice to readers living on the brink of the twenty-first century: the "best thing to do," Powell tells us through Simons, "is to get on with it."

Edisto is ironic in its implication that one must learn the ways of the world in spite of one's parents. But more than an examination of a youth's rite of passage, the book, explained Peter Ross, writing in Detroit News, is "a masterwork of invention, and even more of intelligent feeling, of emotion tempered by sound thinking." Robert Towers's evaluation of Edisto echoed Ross's enthusiastic response. Towers wrote in the New York Times Review of Books that he was "charmed by the book's wit and impressed by its originality. Some turn of phrase, some flash of humor, some freshly observed detail, some acutely rendered perception of a child's pain or a child's amazement transfigures nearly every page."

Powell's follow-up to Edisto is the novel titled A Woman Named Drown. Like its predecessor, Powell's second book explores conventional occurrences in unconventional terms. Al, the narrator of A Woman Named Drown, has been called a grown-up version of Edisto's Simons Manigault. Al is working on his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry when he receives a surprising good-bye letter from his girlfriend of six years. In reaction, he quickly moves in with a woman whom he hardly knows: an aging actress named Mary Constance Baker, whose last role was the lead in a play titled A Woman Named Drown. Mary uses Al as a substitute for her late husband, and after they roam around Florida together for a while, she leaves him in a motel to continue, in Powell's words, his "little downside sabbatical" — alone. Paul Gray of Time suggested that the book's hero "arrives back where he started a mildly wiser fellow." A Woman Named Drown, as T. Coraghessan Boyle noted in the New York Times Book Review, recreates "the distinctive, understated humor that is Mr. Powell's signature. He presents a terrific, hyper-real dialogue in quick, bludgeoned pieces, and his narrator's phrasing and dialect are always surprising and inventive."

In 1996 Powell returned to the character of Simons Manigault in the novel Edisto Revisited. The narrative begins just after Simons has graduated from architectural school. Gripped by a profound malaise, he has no desire to design anything. Then he meets his beautiful cousin Patricia and, according to Tribune Books contributor Alexander Theroux, "wastes no time in laying the foundation for an illicit, passionate affair in good Southern Gothic tradition with this eye-catching relation of his. But this is a novel about chronic drift," added Theroux, "and our wandering protagonist is not about to find salvation in the arms of a woman. Within a month he goes off to Texas. Drift embraced as lifestyle frees him from the suffocating exigencies of life. Drifting allows Simons to a degree to become attuned to the small poetries of everyday existence, at least so he believes in his self-indulgent, overly romantic belief that work robs you of your soul."

Although Edisto Revisited did not draw the lavish praise that its predecessor had, reviewers still found much to like in the book. Theroux noted: "Powell is blessed with a quirky, thoughtful prose style. There are deftly drawn, image-filled passages. Powell paints a spare yet vivid portrait of a seedy South in a novel concerned with giving up on the battles of life before they begin. [Edisto Revisited] is cynical and yet oddly compassionate." Writing in Washington Post Book World, Valerie Sayers described the book as "frustrating and exhilarating, dark and light, willful and mysterious. I wish there were more of it."

Padgett Powell is "a tough writer, remarkably resistant to democratic notions of right and wrong, what's fair and what's unfair," concluded Scott Spencer, a reviewer in New York Times Book Review. "In the intricacies of his brilliant prose, he conceals a stunning stubbornness, a disdain for nostalgia, spirituality, sobriety and, finally, even identity." Spencer went on to call Edisto Revisited "a puzzling work of high style, a rendering of haplessness that seems to poeticize passivity. While his novel may make you wonder if it has much of what is called meaning, Mr. Powell finally overpowers such doubts with his countless quotable passages, his humor and his seductive evocation of the romance of giving up." Also in the New York Times Book Review, A. O. Scott called Edisto and Edisto Revisited "two of the smartest and most affecting recent fictional treatments of young Southern manhood."

Southern manhood is the informing theme of Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men. As the novel commences, the eponymous Mrs. Hollingsworth is sitting down to make a grocery list. What is drawn from her pen, however, is not a list of vegetables but rather a series of reflections on men, quickly evolving into fictions peopled by Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, a shady businessman named Roopit Mogul, and two bumbling criminals, Oswald and Bundy. Mrs. Hollingsworth also details her take on the world, her prejudices, and her dissatisfaction with the mundane pursuits of her "Tupperware" daughters and inattentive husband. In his New York Times Book Review piece on the novel, Robert Kelly wrote that Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men "is a slim, sly deceiver of a book, full of mirth and wickedness At the core of the novel, something rings true: a woman thinks her thoughts. And they create a tumultuous narrative, full of the rancorous prejudices involved in responding to the world around you."

A Publishers Weekly reviewer called Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men an "evocative daydream of a novel," adding: "This challenging but highly inventive narrative is just quirky enough to hit plenty of literary funnybones." Booklist correspondent Neal Wyatt found the vignettes "loosely connected, sometimes incoherent, but beautifully written and oddly appealing." And Kelly deemed the work "indeed a spare book, slender yet full of excitements and dubious desires."

Critics suggest that part of Powell's appeal as a writer lies in his honest treatment of universal themes. His rare ability to attach an intangible moment of insight to a single, concrete experience adds intimacy and credence to his words. A. O. Scott observed that the author is noted for "his devotion to characters who reject the bland conformity of contemporary life: to spirited eccentrics and losers of all kinds. This affection may be a legacy of the South's defeat in the Civil War, or it may have a more general, more strictly contemporary relevance."

In "Hitting Back," an essay Powell published in A World Unsuspected, a collection of childhood memoirs edited by Alex Harris, the author remembers an incident that sparked a transformation in the way he looked at the world: disapproving little Don, a so-called "friend," put dog excrement on the author's Sunday best. As Powell puts it, "I recall this as my very first instance of moral outrage." In the same essay, Powell mourns the tainting of his southern junior high school innocence by the mindset of ignorant whites in positions of power. He and his friend were punished for breaking their school's segregated sex rule on the bus, considered an indirect but effective way of keeping black boys away from white girls. Powell recollects with a sense of loss the naivete that inspired his befuddlement when asked if he knew why this rule existed. "That was precisely it," he recalls. "We couldn't begin to know."

In a phone interview with Andrea Stevens in New York Times Book Review, Powell reflected: "I couldn't fit in ten years ago. I couldn't fit in twenty years ago. My interest remains with those who fail deliberately and those who can't help it." The author also once explained to CA: "Bad luck at fishing and worse with women made me what little writer I am. Had things turned out a bit differently, I'd be Doug Flutie. Reading William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! did it."

Source: Thomson Gale, "Padgett Powell," in Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Brad Vice

In the following essay, Vice gives a critical analysis of Padgett Powell's work.

Padgett Powell is one of the most linguistically inventive American authors and one of the fiction writers of the contemporary South who follows the tracks laid by William Faulkner, the man Flannery O'Connor once described as the "big train." "The first thing I ever wrote was bad Faulkner," admits Powell in his contributor's note in a 1997 issue of The Oxford American magazine, which featured his autobiographical essay "On Coming Late to Faulkner". In the article Powell addresses his former self, the unpublished neophyte, in relation to Faulkner: "[You] with your two-cylinder syntax are a mule and cart being borne down by the Dixie Limited. Fond mocking is, actually, all that you can do, given the roar of the train that blasts you from the track." One might say the same of the mature and successful Powell, whose "fond mocking" is not always easy to digest, with his goofy, white-trash sensibility mixed with an ornate, almost Latinate syntax. Since finding Faulkner, Powell has, in his own words, "made" six books of fiction: four novels, Edisto (1984), A Woman Named Drown (1987), Edisto Revisited (1996), and Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men (2000); and two collections of short stories, Typical (1991) and Aliens of Affection (1998). Typical comprises twenty-two short stories, most of them thematically connected vignettes scattered among a few longer, more traditional short stories. Aliens of Affection comprises two novellas, "Wayne" and "All Along the Watchtower", and five full-length short stories. Powell is also a prolific nonfiction essayist; his articles and book reviews have appeared in many literary magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times Book Review and Esquire.

Powell was born in Gainesville, Florida, on 25 April 1952. His father, Albine Batts Powell, was a brewmaster, and his mother, Bettyre Palmer Powell, taught school. The family relocated to South Carolina when Powell was a young boy. His first love was not literature but science, and in 1975 he graduated from the College of Charleston, in Charleston, South Carolina, with a B.A. in chemistry. His scientific training may be responsible for the precision of his prose. Soon after graduation Powell became a graduate student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville to work toward a master's degree in chemistry, but he soon found himself spending more time reading than studying chemistry. Having lost interest in school, he spent a few years drifting around the Southeast and working as a freight handler, household mover, and orthodontic technician.

Powell worked for almost six years as a roofer in Texas, writing in his spare time, before he eventually entered the prestigious M.F.A. program at the University of Houston, where he studied with the legendary fiction writer Donald Barthelme. In an interview Powell described his former teacher as a kind, caring man who took Powell under his wing because he saw something of himself in his student's determination. Powell recalls that "We had similar tastes. We liked the same things, the same bars, the same books, the same women. The only thing we differed on was music. I only like rock and roll. He always wanted to talk about jazz. He really wasn't so much a writer as a jazz painter on the page." Powell received his master's degree in 1982. During his time in Houston, Powell met his future wife, the poet Sidney Wade, whom he married on 22 May 1984. Both Powell and Wade are now professors at the University of Florida in Powell's hometown of Gainesville. They have two daughters, Amanda Dahl and Elena, both born in the same hospital as their father and grandfather.

Powell burst onto the literary scene with the publication in 1984 of Edisto, a book Walker Percy praised as "a truly remarkable first novel, both as a narrative and in its extraordinary use of language. It reminds one of Catcher in the Rye, but it's better — sharper, funnier, more poignant." Named for a largely undeveloped strip of South Carolina coast, "too small for the Arabs to bother to take," Edisto is narrated by a precocious twelve-year-old boy, Simons Manigault. Simons's mother, separated from his father and called "the Duchess" by Edisto's native black population because of her status as a displaced member of the local gentry, desperately wants her son to grow up to be a writer. Because of the Duchess's lofty aspirations for him, Simons's narration is one of the most unusual voices in recent literary history. Similar to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Simons is a wild creature, fond of skipping school, fishing, and hanging out at the Baby Grand, a local juke joint where the patrons, largely black, slip him beer. For the most part, he is as completely "unsivilized" as Twain's protagonist describes himself to be, except for the heavy doses of Greek and Latin classics Simons's mother force-feeds him daily. As long as Simons continues his literary pursuits, the Duchess turns a blind eye to his truant behavior and allows him to do as he pleases. Simons's mixture of puerile freedom and erudition leads to a literary style that is both philosophically penetrating and winsomely charming.

By the end of the novel Simons's parents have reconciled and his family moves to the plastic world of Hilton Head, South Carolina, a resort island full of condominiums, golf courses, and, worst of all, prep schools. Forced to leave the wildness of his former existence behind, Simons finds himself in a hollow new world where he no longer feels like an individual. Edisto is a bildungsroman, not only of one boy, but of a whole way of life in the South. As the sleepy agrarian past disappears in favor of a new commercial landscape, there is no room for sentimentality or regret. "It's the modern world. I have to accept it," Simons declares in the final chapter of the novel. "I'm a pioneer."

In 1984 Edisto was nominated for a National Book Award and was selected for inclusion in Time magazine's list of the year's best fiction, along with works by Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, John Updike, and Milan Kundera. These honors helped Powell to return to his hometown of Gainesville as a professor of creative writing. He proved to be a dynamic teacher both in and out of class. Not only did Powell show his students how to construct well-made stories, but he would also throw wild parties where the former chemist would instruct his students on how to make homemade bombs out of bottles of Aqua Velva and balloons filled with hydrogen. In 1986, shortly before the publication of his second novel, A Woman Named Drown, Powell received the Whiting Foundation Writers' Award.

Like Powell's first novel, A Woman Named Drown fared well with critics, using the same combination of ordinary circumstances mixed with extraordinary prose. The protagonist, Al, is a Ph.D. student of inorganic chemistry who, like Simons in Edisto, is desperate to avoid responsibility. Al studies chemistry not because he is a "true scientist" like his friend Tom, another student in the same doctoral program, but a "scientist by default." Al sees science as a dodge, an excuse to keep from taking over his millionaire father's pipe business. As the novel opens, Al receives a Dear John letter from his longtime girlfriend, who has left him for a "famous crystallographer." Depressed, he drops out of the doctoral program and, on the rebound, moves in with an older woman he hardly knows, a down-and-out actress named Mary Constance Baker whose last role was in a play titled A Woman Named Drown. After the tumultuous affair ends, Al decides to visit Tom in Alabama, where he has taken a new job. Al finds that his friend has become disappointingly middle-class. Since Tom has abandoned "true" science for money, Al gives in as well and returns to school to complete his degree, knowing that the upcoming year will be his last before he is forced to become the custodian of his father's pipe empire.

In a review of A Woman Named Drown published in the 7 June 1987 issue of The New York Times Book Review, T. Coraghessan Boyle writes that "All of these adventures are enlivened by the distinctive, understated humor that is Mr. Powell's signature. He presents a terrific, hyper- real dialogue in quick bludgeoned pieces, and his narrator's phrasing and dialect are always surprising and inventive."

In an interview published with Boyle's review of A Woman Named Drown, Powell discussed his work thus far and his plans for the future with journalist Alex Ward. "I don't want to be thought of as a six-bout fighter," said Powell, who, like his character Al, is fond of boxing metaphors. "I'd rather be considered for what I do over the long haul." Being valued for the long haul means showing a certain amount of variance and growth. According to Powell, Edisto is based on a real person, while A Woman Named Drown is "pure fiction." His second novel began as a dream he had while enrolled in a writing workshop taught by Barthelme at the University of Houston. The dream was so vivid that Powell wrote it down quickly and read it to the class. "They thought it was horrible," he recalled, "But you always feel embarrassed with a story at first." Powell added, "the story goes through a gestation period in your mind and you know you have to write it. So you do, and then you really embarrass yourself." This insight into the writing process referred not only to his previous work but also to a new book he was in the middle of writing, tentatively titled "Mr. Irony." At the time of the interview, Powell described the book as being about two women from Texas who take an incredibly cheap world tour with two gentlemen, one of whom is the title character. "I'm not sure what I've got here," he said about the manuscript, "except that it's supposed to be humorous, and it needs work."

"Mr. Irony" underwent significant revision over the next three years. Some of this time Powell spent traveling. In 1989 he was a Fulbright fellow in Turkey. Upon his return "Mr. Irony" was published, not as a novel but as a densely packed short story, in The Paris Review. It was a landmark story for Powell's career, for it marked a complete departure from his previously realistic fiction and served as a sort of ars poetica. "Mr. Irony" is a dazzling piece of metafiction.

Even in Powell's first two novels, one can easily see that he was attempting to adopt the humor and linguistic playfulness that Barthelme engineered in short-story collections such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964) and novels such as The Dead Father (1975). But neither Edisto nor A Woman Named Drown pushed the boundaries of fiction as much as Powell's next work, the 1991 short-story collection Typical, in which "Mr. Irony" was republished. With this book he proved that he was approaching the kind of postmodern assault on form that had made his mentor famous.

The arch-absurdist Barthelme is thinly disguised as the title character in "Mr. Irony", the longest story and the centerpiece of the collection. Powell himself appears in the story as Mr. Irony's "student of low-affected living edged with self-deprecating irony." Teacher and student embark on the "Man-at-His-Best World Tour," via "unspecified variable means of transport," with two Texas women found at the International Hostelry for Available Traveling Women. The two couples dive from the cliffs in Acapulco, ride elephants in Lanxang (Laos) and join a Rocky Mountain goat safari. Toward the end of the tour, Mr. Irony's student narrator decides to withdraw himself from the narrative in hopes of making the story better: "I had in fact picked up my self-deprecating ironic ways from Mr. Irony, whose student I allegedly was. I could serve the tale best, I thought, and finally not without considerable self-deprecation and irony, by removing myself from it, and deciding thereupon to do so, and hereby pronounce myself expunged from this affair as teller — ." The narration is saved by Mr. Irony himself, who assures his student that he should not make himself "scarce" because he has the ability and talent to finish the tale. Powell's statement concerning the nature of art is clear. Irony, self-doubt, and self-deprecation are tools the writer must use to prevent his ego from getting ahead of the work, but these should never be used as an excuse for quitting. "Things need you, son," Mr. Irony tells his protégé near the end of the story.

Typical begins with an epigraph from Barthelme asserting that the virtue of desire is greater than the virtue of honesty: "Truth is greatly overrated, volition where it exists must be protected, wanting itself can be obliterated, some people have forgotten how to want." Of the characters that populate the stories of Typical, some are more honest than others, but all somehow deal with a reduced capacity to want; most of them have become emotionally paralyzed by their dreary, everyday lives. The metafictional "Mr. Irony" spawned a series of "Mister" stories that are featured in Typical, including "Mr. Nefarious", "Miss Resignation", "Dr. Ordinary", "General Rancidity", and "Mr. Irony Renounces Irony". They are mostly amusing, lyrical vignettes, one- or two-page portraits of characters whose personalities seem to be wholly dependent on the habits or emotional states indicated by their names. Many of these stories seem as if they could have been written by Barthelme himself. Like his mentor, Powell appears to prefer short fiction that explores the limits of language rather than stories that rehash tired plots and draw their power from a simple conflict. In this way the series of "Mister" stories that occupy much of Typical are anything but typical.

In other stories from the collection, such as "The Winnowing of Mrs. Schuping" and "Letter from a Dogfighter's Aunt, Deceased", Powell melds his postmodern training with his Southern gothic upbringing to forge a style that is completely his own. Reminiscent of Carson McCullers's work, "The Winnowing of Mrs. Schuping" is a portrait of a feisty spinster who has decided to simplify her life by divesting herself of responsibilities and possessions. The occupation of winnowing away her life requires a new name, and she arbitrarily renames herself Mrs. Schuping. Unlike Mr. Irony, who loves to travel and wax philosophical about the nature of narrative, Mrs. Schuping gives up travel and reading altogether. She has come to distrust reality completely, and this distrust immobilizes her. She is content to preside serenely over the deterioration of her house, until her winnowing plans are interrupted by a local sheriff, a fat, amorous man who, "in the river of life's winnowing," acts as a "big boulder in the bed of the dwindling stream."

"Letter from a Dogfighter's Aunt, Deceased" is a ghost story told from the perspective of the ghost, an unusual narrative point of view that is both first person and omniscient. This meditative perspective comes from one long dead, but not too long. Aunt Humpy, formerly a stuck-up librarian maniacally intent on correcting her family's grammar, now lovingly watches over Brody, a nephew she helped run away from home so that he could become a breeder of fighting dogs. From her vantage point in Heaven she looks kindly on her fierce nephew, who is now a nonchurchgoer and career criminal. Brody lives on the margins of society, a rogue white male determined to be free of middle-class mores. Aunt Humpy is proud of her nephew because she is now free of the "myriad prejudices and passions and myopias that made us the human being we mortally became." She appreciates the purity of Brody's lawless existence in the same way that he appreciates the purity of the thoroughbred dogs he conditions "to a point suggesting piano wires and marble, reduced by another sculpted cat to a soft red lump resembling bloody terry cloth." In a sense Aunt Humpy is an apologist for the Southerners about whom Powell writes best: tough, mean, yet often sweet boys and men such as Simons and Al, whose self-determined sense of right and wrong often comes into conflict with those in the mainstream.

In the title story, "Typical", Powell proves that he has not lost his ear for the way white, blue-collar Southern males talk and carry themselves. "Typical" is a loosely structured interior monologue filtered through the consciousness of an unemployed steel-mill worker, John Payne. Payne's observations concerning the nature of money, sex, marriage, and race are both comic and narrow-minded, yet his insights into his own limitations and shortcomings are nothing short of remarkable: "I'm not nice, not too smart, don't see too much point in pretending to be either. Why I am telling anyone this trash is a good question. There are many mysteries in this world. I should be a better person, I know I should, but I don't see that finally being up to choice. If it were, I would not stop at being a better person. Who would?" Payne is a "typical" white male, frustrated by his lot in life. Depressed by his inability to control his life, Payne has lost the desire to do anything but drink. As Barthelme warned in the epigraph to the book, Payne has "forgotten how to want." Now he is merely another victim of social and economic forces beyond his control, and rather than continue to combat these indiscriminately, he has given in to a sort of blue-collar fatalism.

"Typical" was selected for inclusion in the 1990 edition of The Best American Short Stories and also won a Pushcart Prize that year. Several other pieces from Typical were selected for inclusion in other prize-winning anthologies. "Letter from a Dogfighter's Aunt, Deceased" was selected for inclusion in the anthology The Literary Ghost: Great Contemporary Ghost Stories (1991) under the title "Voice from the Grave". "The Winnowing of Mrs. Schuping" was anthologized in the 1992 edition of New Stories From the South and was later selected by novelist Anne Tyler for inclusion in Best of the South: From Ten Years of New Stories from the South (1996).

In 1996 Powell returned to the novel genre as well as to his most popular character, Simons Manigault, with Edisto Revisited. The narrative begins just after Simons has graduated from architecture school. No longer is he a wild creature of the Carolina coast. His education has caused him, like many of the characters in Typical, to give up hope. Profoundly depressed, Simons finds that he has no desire to do anything but consume alcohol. He is momentarily saved by a passionate love affair with his cousin Patricia. The novel wastes little time in laying the foundations of an incestuous romance in the Faulknerian tradition. But even this relationship becomes too much responsibility for Simons to handle, and eventually he flees back to Edisto to find his old friends. Although Edisto Revisited did not draw the lavish praise that Edisto did, reviewers still found much to like in the book, calling it a tour de force of style. Near the end of Edisto Revisited Simons, determined to grow up, renounces the self-defeating indulgences of alcohol, just as Powell himself decided around this time to stop drinking.

There is always a hint in Powell's writing that his fiction is really just autobiography cast into a multitude of masks and personae. Powell has indicated in interviews that Simons is based on a "real person," while the chemistry-student protagonist of A Woman Named Drown pursues Powell's abandoned study of science. "Typical" and "Mr. Irony" reflect two different aspects of Powell's personality. The unemployed Payne is a realistic character reminiscent of the kind of men that Powell would have worked with closely as a day laborer in Texas, while "Mr. Irony" depicts Powell's relationship with his teacher Barthelme and employs the artful fictional techniques that Barthelme practiced.

The fictive positions in "Typical" and "Mr. Irony" seem to be mixed in "Wayne's Fate", another of the stories in Typical. Wayne is a half-intoxicated roofer who loses his balance atop a high building and is decapitated during the fall. His severed head lands in a five-gallon bucket of mastic. The story concludes with the reattachment of his head and the semiresurrection of his corpse. At the end the reader discovers that Wayne is not fully functional but is capable of making lewd comments. He convinces the narrator of the story, a fellow roofer, to make a few lewd comments to the owner of the home they are repairing while they await the paramedics.

Several other Wayne stories were published in Powell's 1998 short-story collection, Aliens of Affection. These stories display a further renovation of Powell's style and an intensification of his linguistic playfulness. He uses extravagant language as a tool to create further ironic space between author and characters as well as between characters and readers. Unlike Powell's previous writings, in which he seemed rather intimate with his characters, in the aptly titled Aliens of Affection he holds his characters at arm's length. Not only are they emotionally alienated from the reader, they are alienated from themselves. Few characters in these stories speak with the clarity or coherence of Payne in "Typical". Most of them are psychotic, drug-addled, and even brain-damaged. In essence, Powell has abandoned realism for a fictional world filtered through a myriad of unusual psychological states.

In the other Wayne stories in Aliens of Affection Wayne has not prospered since his decapitation in Typical. He is now out of work, and his teeth are falling out. His wife, Felicia (Wayne refers to her simply as "Ugly"), kicks him out of their home for being selfish. As it turns out in the course of the Wayne stories, he is a harmless, irresponsible drunk who drifts from one episode to the next, pointlessly rotating among women, bars, and menial jobs. The last section of "Wayne" is told by an intrusive narrator who explains that Wayne's lack of psychological depth is worthy of study: "Wayne isn't afraid of anything because he knows he is afraid. I, by contrast, think myself fearless, and when something scares me, it scares the shit out of me." These moments of fear force the narrator to "undergo a little private analysis the likes of which have never troubled Wayne." Wayne's cowardice, meanness, low intelligence, and lack of motivating psychology are actually assets. The narrator editorializes the ending of the sequence by again comparing Wayne to himself, lamenting, "For all my teeth! Muscles! College!" The narrator is plagued by a sense of self-doubt that never hinders Wayne: "Wayne may be roofing, but I am afraid."

A trilogy of stories in Aliens of Affection appears under the title "All Along the Watchtower". The stories feature a nameless pseudohero resembling Wayne-perhaps the same protagonist in all three stories, perhaps not-who negotiates the indistinct boundaries of personality. In "Chihuahua" the narrator, a former mental patient, sets off on an arbitrary quest to locate a fifty-pound Chihuahua. This takes him south of the border to Mexico, where he finds not only the freakish dog but also a local nurse who supplies the narrator with pills, sex, and the illusion that life can be simple and even pastoral. The narrator of "Stroke" also seems to have diminished mental capacity. The narrative unfolds with all the unimpeded honesty of a stroke victim who cannot edit his thoughts. In the forty-page title story, "Aliens of Affection", the last in the trilogy, the narrator inhabits yet another haze of delusion in which metaphors become literal and the actual world is lost in a fog of language. But readers are still sure they are in the South, or at least the literary South, because of the presence of a devil-may-care Southern belle, Dale Mae.

The departure from traditional narrative and plot in Typical is extended to a radical reinvention of the concept of characters in Aliens of Affection. Many readers might accuse Powell's later characters of flatness, but what they lack in depth they make up for in originality. Because several of the characters in Aliens of Affection are mentally deficient and are incapable of articulating the futility of their own lives as perceptively as Payne in "Typical", or as eloquently as Simons in Edisto and Edisto Revisited and Al in A Woman Named Drown, they are more content to let the absurdity of the world they live in speak for itself. When commentary is needed, the author must make it directly himself, as he does at the end of the Wayne stories.

Another of Powell's schizoid characters, Rod, takes on the persona of Scarliotti in "Scarliotti and the Sinkhole", also from Aliens of Affection. Rod is a trailer-park resident who has been struck in the head by the side mirror of a moving truck. Because he refuses to take his medication, he develops a split personality disorder and creates a new persona to act out his more heroic side. Rod names this more heroic and dangerous alter ego Scarliotti. As Scarliotti, Rod manages to seduce a gas station attendant who really only sleeps with him in order to drink his beer and take his medication. The story ends with a sinkhole threatening to swallow up Rod's trailer. It is difficult to determine whether this sinkhole is a literal danger or an absurdist metaphor for Rod's increasingly dismal existence. He cannot combat the sinkhole as Scarliotti, nor even escape from it as Rod. The story ends with a babbling monologue that shifts between a meditation on dogfighting and an analysis of the Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart.

It is difficult to decide whether Powell's Southern absurdism is a tool for social commentary or simply a tool to poke fun at his characters. To some extent, the radical assault on character in the stories of Aliens of Affection seems to be another attempt to comment upon the changing nature of the South, which is described as a "vale of dry tears" in the story "Trick or Treat". In contrast to colorful, realistic characters such as Simons and Al, who follow in a long line of disaffected Southerners mourning the loss of the old, aristocratic South, Powell's more recent characters are simply incapable of fitting in. They are victims of insanity, stroke, and brain damage, failing to adjust to contemporary life but still clinging to fragmented memories of the old South, to such things as dogfights and Civil War heroes. In an essay titled "Whupped Before Kilt", originally appearing in a 1998 issue of The Oxford American magazine and later republished as the preface to the 1998 edition of New Stories From the South, Powell points out that since the South lost the Civil War, Southern literature has been a literature focused on failure. Quoting Faulkner's Wash Jones in Absalom, Absalom! (1936)-" Well, Kernel, they mought have kilt us, but they ain't whipped us yit, air they?"-Powell asserts that the "literature of the South is full of people running around admitting or denying their whippedness." In contrast to the state of "whippedness," he sees integrity to be "the denial of whippedness." The various figures that populate Powell's later short stories display the unusual characteristic of being "whupped," but because they do not know they are whipped they retain a certain amount of integrity. The reader knows that characters such as Wayne and Rod are victims of circumstance. As victims they will inevitably be bested in their personal dogfights with the world at large. Wayne and Rod, however, do not know that they are underdogs. Their ignorance to their plight causes them to be fearless, and in this fearlessness readers may find a small but deep reservoir of integrity. As with Typical, the stories in Aliens of Affection brought Powell awards for the power and insight of his writing. "Aliens of Affection", the final story in the trilogy "All Along the Watchtower", was selected for the 1998 edition of New Stories from the South. That same year, "Wayne in Love" was selected by Garrison Keillor for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories.

Throughout his career, Powell has attempted to reinvent the literature of the old South by paying particular attention to the aspects of the Southern literary tradition that make it unique, primarily the language of the region. From Edisto to Aliens of Affection, Powell's adept use of inventive syntax, coupled with his finely tuned ear for dialect, has drawn favorable comparisons with such masters of regionalism as Twain and Faulkner. Powell is not, however, a writer lost in the past; his subject matter is that of the contemporary South, a new urban landscape that threatens to erase the identity of the old South as the region gives in to commercial forces from beyond its borders. The traditional theme of defeated Southerner is consistent throughout Powell's body of work. The author's nonconformist "whupped" characters, from Simons to Wayne, are used to critique a culture that has given itself over to the vapid worship of success.

As a writer of short fiction, Powell is one of the few writers who have successfully managed to combine postmodern absurdism with the gothic and grotesque traditions of Southern regionalism. In this sense, his short stories appear to be the direct heir to the work of Barthelme and O'Connor. Like his teacher Barthelme, Powell frequently abandons traditional narrative for fictions that seem to exist in a pure realm of language. Much of his work is unencumbered by realistic plots, and even in his more straightforward stories the settings and characters can only be described as odd or idiosyncratic. Like O'Connor, Powell endeavors to create memorable misfits, his most notable creations being the meditative Mrs. Schuping and the crazed roofer Wayne. Many of Powell's characters seem to be allegorical in nature, with personalities invented to question conventional notions of individuality or even philosophical notions of free will; others are just plain funny.

Source: Brad Vice, "Padgett Powell," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 234, American Short-Story Writers Since World War II, Third Series, edited by Patrick Meanor and Richard E. Lee, The Gale Group, 2001, pp. 250-56.