Quite a Year for Plums: A Novel

Bailey White's dry, low-key drawl is a familiar (and welcome) sound to millions of National Public Radio regulars. On the radio, her intimate vignettes of small-town life are loosely held together by their subjects, who are themselves tightly held together by love, family, and idiosyncrasy. This episodic mode suits her just as well as a novelist. In this audio version of Quite a Year for Plums--which, aside from the occasional bit of atmospheric banjo music, features none but the author's voice--even the temporary denizens of her fictional southern Georgia town have their oddities. A bird artist is obsessed by a vanishing breed of chickens. Another character dreams obsessively of typography. The permanent townsfolk include a woman who believes in little spacemen, a pair of bookish retired schoolteachers, and plant pathologist and banjo picker Roger Meadows, whose peers would like nothing better than to see him settle down with the right woman. The author has an eye--and, of course, ear--for the telling detail and the decisive, domestic moment, and listeners will no doubt enjoy her adept storytelling skills. (Running time: five and one-half hours, four cassettes)