Padgett Powell’s novel, Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men, is a challenging narrative filled with oddball characters and shrewd opinions. Powell, a National Book Award nominee, has written a book that confuses, entertains, and instructs.
With varied pace and style, Powell tells an enigmatic story reminiscent of authors past. By blending stream-of-consciousness riffs with colloquial complexity, Powell evokes thoughts of Kerouac and Faulkner, while creating a new voice unique to himself. Not an easy task, and one well worth reading.
“Mrs. Hollingsworth likes to traipse … enjoys a solidarity with fruit … [and] regards friendly dogs with suspicion.” She wants to “summon a plumber and pour something caustic down the crack of his ass” as he assumes the “plumbing position.” She also dislikes Volvos and NPR, writes fiction disguised as shopping lists, and invites imaginary men into her steaming-hot bathtub. She revels in her creations and imbues her characters with life; they accompany her in suburbia as she enhances her mundane reality with Civil War Generals and ray guns.
Mrs. Hollingsworth sits at her kitchen table and writes an intricate story revolving around Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a long-deceased soldier who haunts both her and her characters. Her imagined “Forrest turns to fire, his mouth a monalisa. His spurs melt into the ground like mercury.” His presence flows throw Mrs. Hollingsworth’s personal novel and Padgett Powell’s published one.
Mrs. Hollingsworth’s writing is at first tentative, but as her fingers become ink-stained and as her mind races with creative excitement, she embraces her newfound hobby. She varies her textual style, switching from slang dialogue to straight prose, and her writing gains momentum as her self-confidence grows.
But as she gains confidence in her writing, she loses confidence in herself. She worries about her daughters, the “Tupperware sisters,” who try to stop the “deterioration of the home scene” by criticizing their mom’s behavior. They look down their noses at Mrs. Hollingsworth, who becomes increasingly frustrated with their hollow vanity. She is annoyed by their conformist humdrum lives. She compares her daughters and most humans to bees that buzz “along chewing something up and spitting something out until” they buzz no more, not thinking or feeling much along the way.
Mrs. Hollingsworth is fed up with plastic life and shopping mall culture:
The pristine tracts of the new wilderness are the fresh expanses of asphalt around malls. A new petroleum air of virgin potential resides there, but only until the Volvos and the skateboards pull in. The Volvos discharge baby strollers and easy-listening FM, the skateboards the funk of boys, all taming the new wilderness.Mrs. Hollingsworth is tired of “living in stilled and stilted timid toadspawn conformity.” Her creativity saves her, and she enjoys living in her fictional world. Her stilled and stilted reality is replaced with a more interesting, more sensual, more enjoyable life.
And then Padgett Powell flips everything upside down, making her life [and his book] even better. Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men is a riddle that gains momentum, steamrolls, and, at the last second, changes into something simple and poignant. It’s a novel well worth reading. Twice.
*Originally published in the Charleston City Paper
