The Cockroaches of Stay More - Softcover

Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother's hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by story-tellers. His academic career is in art and art history and he has taught art history at a variety of colleges, including his alma mater, the University of Arkansas. His first novel was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published twelve other novels, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. He has also written books about artists. He won the Robert Penn Warren Award in 2003, the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. He has been called "an undiscovered continent" (Fred Chappell) and "America's Greatest Unknown Novelist" (Entertainment Weekly).

With this wonderfully irreverent comic novel, Harington leaves off chronicling the human inhabitants of the Arkansas Ozark town of Stay More ( Lightning Bug , etc.) and turns his attention to its insect world. In depicting the cockroach community, who perambulate on gitalongs, apprehend their environment through sniffwhips and commit unwitting malapropisms about the mysterious world of Man (and Woman), Harington unleashes a sprightly, antic imagination. Among the anthropomorphic cast of characters are a lover's triangle consisting of the hero, aristocratic, hearing-impaired Squire Sam Ingledew; his loved one, lowborn, resourceful Tish Dingletoon; and his rival for her love, Archy, son of the sinning, conniving fundamentalist preacher Chid Tichborne. Speaking in colorfully juicy dialect, full of country expressions and cadences, the insects substitute two vital words for their otherwise human vocabulary: to die is to west (giving rise to such expressions as west to the world or west drunk); to be alive is to east (fertile females lay easter eggs). Their existence is influenced by the downfall of Man (in delicious irony, he is a writer who boozes too much), whom they worship as a descendant of Joshua Crust. The story contains suspense, romance, heroism, skulduggery and religious philosophizing, in a highly risible mix. Only at the end does Harington become too arch, causing the narrative to faltera small flaw in a thoroughly entertaining novel.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.