Sallowsfield: A Novel
By Cliff Hudder
Literary Fiction / Humor / Saga / Texas / Yorkshire
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Pages: 390Publication Date: October 21, 2024
Wyatt W. Sallow, MBA—poet, business ethics professor, and coach of the 8th ranked collegiate chess team in East Texas—travels to the heart of northern England to trace his family origins in mundane Sallowsfield, only to find his supposed ancestry a mirage. He does have a real past, however: one that stalks him across the green hillsides in echoes of his catastrophic marriage, the lingering shadow of a lost child, and—there, in person, inexplicably emerging from the town’s faux-Victorian train station—“X,” the enigmatic object of his unrequited passion and a figure as perplexing as an algebraic variable.
On his eight-day tour/pilgrimage/mock epic journey, Wyatt pursues the specter of his lost love and crosses paths with the citizens of this down-at-its-heels market town as they struggle to grasp the all-consuming obsessions, ghosts, and X-factors that confound their days.
Thought-provoking yet dryly humorous, Sallowsfield weaves diverse elements into a story both light-hearted and philosophical, exploring along the way universal human touchstones of obsession, ruined love, and the inexplicable mysteries that shape our lives.
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Wyatt is a fascinating and rather hapless main character in this well-written new literary novel. Reading his story was a delight and thought-provoking. It was funny in places, but also sad as the distressing events of his past are slowly revealed throughout. Life is never just one thing, and this truth is illustrated so well in Sallowsfield.
When Wyatt makes the long trip to Sallowsfield from Texas to connect with what he has been told is the English birthplace of his family, not only is he on that quest but one more of the “heart.” A fleeting image of a woman he believes is his latest lost love sends him on another quest, and part of his journey through the town is in an effort to find her. The conversations with Hussain, the taxi driver who drives Wyatt from one place to another are in some ways an invitation to Wyatt to reexamine the need to find this woman that he refers to as X, but Wyatt can’t seem to let go of the obsession.
Obsession is a trait he battles in many ways, from how he can’t walk through stanchions between a parking and walking area without touching them in a particular pattern, to following through on a determination to do something, even when it’s clear he should not. Like trying to walk down a steep hill as a shortcut.
Wyatt meets several women that touch his life, if only briefly. Amy who manages the hotel where Wyatt has a room, and Gail, who he meets at the University. Both women are introduced with full backstories that are quite interesting and have a bit of the same eccentricity and emotional misery that marks Wyatt’s life. Gail’s experience with the outdoor summer concert in West Texas with her friend, Kathy and a bag of mushrooms, is a mix of humorous and depressing, much like his encounter with a fellow professor at the Texas college, Priyanka Chaudry. Chaudry comes into Wyatt’s trailer as he is in a compromising position and lamenting the loss of X. There is humor there, but also sadness to see how much Wyatt needs the comfort of this professor-friend who he will never see again.
I highlighted a number of things that made me stop for a moment as I read. In this scene when he’s first met X and they’re forming a relationship of sorts, they talk about her wanting to put a lock of her hair in his casket when he dies. She says, “The point of it is, I’ll spend the rest of time intermingled with you. But it makes me sad.”
He tries for a joke, ” From Hair to eternity.”
“…laughing with her made him feel good. It had made him feel good on both of the occasions it had happened.”
So much is revealed about their relationship in that simple sentence, like how he deflects her sadness with an attempt at humor as well as a deep longing on his part.
Every aspect of the writing is so well done, and the descriptions are presented with an artist’s eye such as, “Here, fields as regularly shaped as quilt panels hug the hillsides, their borders marked by what he would be very interested to know are called hedgerows…” Maybe this one resonated with me because I’m a quilter, but I could clearly see the patterns.
Sallowsfield is deserving of all the accolades it has already received, and I add mine to the list. If you like a literary novel that explores various aspects of human nature and presents it all with a character who will make you laugh and perhaps shed a tear, don’t pass up this terrific book.
Cliff Hudder received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Houston in 1995 and a PhD in American Literature from Texas A&M in 2017. He has been an archaeological laborer, a film and video editor, photographer, air compressor mechanic, electrical lineman, and educator. His fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review and other journals and his work has received the Barthelme and Michener Awards, the Peden Prize, and the Short Story Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. His novella, Splinterville, won the 2007 Texas Review Fiction Award, and his novel, Pretty Enough for You, was named a Top Ten Texas Favorite by Lone Star Literary Life in 2015. In 2017 Cliff was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.
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