Liberating Paris by Linda Bloodworth Thomason

From the Publisher

Woodrow McIlmore is leading the perfect life in Paris, Arkansas: married to his high school sweetheart, he has two wonderful children and a warm circle of family and friends. When Wood's daughter announces that she wants to marry a college classmate, Wood is stunned. But that's just the tip of the iceberg — her intended is the son of the woman who left Wood twenty years earlier, the free-spirited Duff. And so begins a tumultuous year in Paris, as Duff returns and familiar sparks fly with her old flame. Their rekindled passion affects not only Wood and Duff but also their good friends, as they must now all decide what in their lives is worth keeping and what needs to be thrown away.

Publishers Weekly

The collapse of a marriage comes as a seismic shock to a group of six high school friends now on the verge of middle age in this splendid, often hilarious first novel by television writer and producer Bloodworth Thomason (Designing Women, etc.). Five of the friends still live in unpretentious Paris, Ark.: Wood MacKelmore, the third-generation local doctor ("Wood was to the group what Frank Sinatra was to the Rat Pack"); Milan, Wood's gorgeous wife of 20 years who grew up dirt poor; Wood's close friend Earl Brundidge Jr., who runs the town liquor store and is a single father of two little girls; Mavis Pinkerton, Milan's best friend, an accomplished cook who owns a bakery; and Carl Jeter, a quadriplegic who was injured in a football game at 17 and is now a poet. The sixth member of the group is flamboyant rebel Duff, Wood's first love and Milan's nemesis. Duff moved away after high school, but when Milan's daughter, Elizabeth, comes home from college announcing plans to marry a classmate, Luke Childs, it isn't long before everyone realizes that Luke is Duff's son. Thrown together by their children's engagement, Wood and Duff rekindle their long-ago affair, jeopardizing not only Wood's marriage but also the relationships among their friends. A thicket of sideplots including the unwelcome arrival of a chain discount megastore, Mavis's quest to find a sperm donor and Brundidge's long-distance romance with a New Yorker give the novel a rich, layered feel. Poignant, welcoming and warmly funny, this is an irresistible page-turner. 10-city author tour. (Sept. 7) Forecast: Bloodworth Thomason is famously an FOB (Friend of Bill); hopefully, her association with the Clintons won't scare Republican readers away from this nonpartisan small-town saga. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In her debut novel, acclaimed television writer/producer Thomason (M*A*S*H; The Mary Tyler Moore Show) tells the story of six friends whose lives change when two of them have an affair. Set in small-town Arkansas, it concerns aging parents, adolescent children, and ticking biological clocks, as well as the image and identity of the South. The profound changes brought to the town by the arrival of a huge discount store serve as a backdrop for the struggles of the quirky characters, whom Thomason develops through funny dialog and vivid descriptions of the past and present. Although there are moments of poignancy, the ending is upbeat, with a chaotic wedding scene that impacts the whole town; readers will enjoy the antics of the extended families, friends, and neighbors. Recommended for public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/04.] Elizabeth Blakesley Lindsay, Washington State Univ. Lib., Pullman Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The TV writer and producer, not to mention famous F.O.B. (Friend of Bill), debuts with the chronicle of one eventful year in a small town where a few high-school friends are still close. Like an overfurnished room, Bloodworth-Thomason's story is stuffed with colorful characters who (not surprisingly) all talk and behave like actors in a TV show. The small group of friends live in Paris, Arkansas, where a big superstore has been built out on the highway, so that everyone is shopping out there instead of patronizing the old Main Street businesses. This megastore and a group of prejudiced rednecks are the villains in an essentially sentimental tale that's book-ended by a death and a wedding. When Dr. Mac dies, fortysomething Wood Mackelmore, his son and a physician, feels even more down about his own life. His marriage to Milan seems as dull as his job, and he's feeling restless. His friends Mavis, Jeter, and Brundidge also have their issues. Mavis is single and owns a successful bakery, but she wants a baby. Jeter, who is confined to a wheelchair thanks to a football injury, writes poetry and dreams of love. And Brundidge-divorced, lonely, and determined to preserve Paris-refuses to shop at the superstore. As the friends mourn Dr. Mac, Wood's daughter Elizabeth announces that she's going to marry fellow college student Luke, who is the son of Duff, an old high-school flame of Wood's. And as the year passes, Wood and Duff get together, while Milan, who has overcome a terrible past-poverty and her father's suicide in front of her-tries to plan the wedding while ignoring Wood's infidelity. The friends are preoccupied, too, as Mavis finds an unlikely sperm donor, has a baby, and realizes she'sgay; some louts attack Mavis, Jeter tries to save her, and Brundidge may at last have found love. As the year finally ends, there's a wrap-up of a wedding with a difference. More script than novel.

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Chapter One

Imagine a town that hardly anyone has ever heard of. Yet everyone has seen one like it. It is just before daylight and the Main Street is coming into view. There are cracks in the sidewalk with stubborn little patches of grass sticking through them. Most of the stores are boarded up, but one that isn't has a lot of naked mannequins lying around in the window. A fall breeze comes up and blows some leaves lightly against the cracked glass pane, blows the stoplight where no one is waiting, until it swings drunkenly from its cable.

Just past all this, if you look hard, you will see the fire station and the football stadium and then the interstate where something large and pitifully ugly has been put up. Something to take the place of the town. There is a fifty-yard banner stretched across the front of it that says: "Home of the new Fed-Mart Superstore."

A few miles beyond that is a much smaller sign, really about the size of a world atlas. It's nailed to a wooden gate, and you can tell by its shabby condition that it's been there a long time. The sign reads fast deer farm, but there aren't any deer around. Just a middle-aged man on a horse. He is wearing some red-checkered pajama bottoms and drinking whiskey from an upturned bottle and riding as fast as he can toward the sun. If you lived around here, you would know that his name is Woodrow Phineas McIlmore the Third. But most people call him Wood, except his mother, who calls him Woodrow. Even though Wood and Sook -- that's his horse's name -- take this same ride every morning, they are in no hurry to arrive anywhere. They already know the bright light on the horizon moves farther into the distance the nearer you get. Well, really, Wood and Dapplegreys Ultraviolet, the granddaddy of Sook, figured this out when Wood was still a boy -- it was the ride itself that was worthy -- the swift exhilaration of speed and spirit, the complete aloneness of two equestrian astronauts hurling themselves through the green space of a thousand velvet acres -- cool customers in their youth, now just two old friends trying to prove one more time that they can still ride the ride.

The boy and his horse had once set out for the sun and quickly learned what others had tried to put into words -- that becoming is probably better than being, that there is only one thing in between and that is the ride. The ride is everything -- not the arrival at some distant or imagined spot of light from which you would probably just see another spot of light and then another until you didn't know where you were or maybe you would even fall from the sky like Icarus for flying too near the sun or end up floating facedown in your swimming pool like Gatsby, who had worshipped too closely to the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. No, there was no question about it: Forget about the light. Just keep your head down and stay on the ride.

Wood felt lucky to know such a thing. And if his morning workout with Sook didn't make it clear, the walls of his study were lined with the favored novels of three generations of McIlmores. Books that were full of myopic, vainglorious fools who had not only failed to appreciate the ride, they had gotten off, like some fevered hoboes looking for Big Rock Candy Mountain, and wandered stupidly into irony, mayhem, and even the jaws of a killer whale.

That wasn't Wood. He knew what a fine meal had been laid upon his table. He retrieved the whiskey bottle from the hip pocket of his pajama bottoms and unscrewed the cap -- "Whoa, slow her down now, girl, that's the way," he coaxed Sook as she adjusted her pace to his need. He brought the flask to his lips, turning it up full tilt and draining the remainder of the whiskey inside. It went down smooth, warming him, like the maple syrup Mae Ethel used to make for his pancakes. Try as he might, he had never been able to reproduce for his own children the thick, sweet texture that flowed like a small mudslide across and then down the lightest, fluffiest pancakes ever poured on a griddle (nor could the cooks at the local Waffle House, despite his meticulous embellishments). Fluffy was not a word Wood used often but that's what they were, damnit; they were fluffy and he missed them! He missed Mae Ethel, too. For some reason he thought of her whenever he drank whiskey. Maybe that was her secret ingredient for the syrup or maybe it was just that the liquor and the woman warmed him, especially on fall mornings like this when he rode without a shirt. Ah, Mae Ethel, his jolly, all-knowing angel who was colored when he first knew her but later became black. The person who used to scoop him up like warm laundry and press him against her huge, pillowy bosom, laughing her high-pitched approval at his simplest declaration.

His parents were equally doting, but it was Mae Ethel who physically loved him up each day, squeezing his flesh, swinging him, holding him. Mae Ethel, filling every inch of the doorway with her hands-on-hips massive presence, a symphony of happy, human noise moving joyfully through the McIlmore house. Mae Ethel, who had no expectations and therefore no judgments of him other than "do right" and "be happy," and who had been born before self-esteem was discovered but had somehow managed to electrify her charge with the simple admonition, "Study hard now, Peaches." It wasn't a warning, really. It was more like a good tip. But by the time she said it, she had already filled him up with so much highly combustible good stuff, all she had to do was light the match and the boy was on fire ...