Heart of Palm

January 28, 2013
Independence Day is a turning point for the Bravo family of small-town Utina on Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway. It’s the day they must consider a multimillion-dollar offer for the formerly backwoods, now valuable, land surrounding the family restaurant and their adjacent home. For the contentious brood’s matriarch, 62–year-old Arla, the deal would mean ending the reclusive life she’s led since her feckless husband Dean decamped two decades ago. For her emotionally volatile daughter, Sofia, it would mean losing her home. For Carson, the eldest son, the windfall could cover the Ponzi scheme he’s been running out of his St. Augustine investment firm, while for middle son Frank, the restaurant manager, it might mean a new beginning with Carson’s wife, Elizabeth. For all of them, accepting the offer would involve leaving the place where the youngest brother, Will, died tragically 20 years ago on July 4, the victim of his father’s irresponsibility and his brothers’ jealousy. The Bravos, once notorious Utina badasses, find their adult ties of guilt and regret beginning to frazzle as long-dormant resentments emerge. Smith’s debut novel exudes authenticity as she chronicles the lives of her “Southern Crackers,” mired in bad behavior and feelings of inferiority. She turns a phrase with wit, especially when good old boys discuss football (the Florida Gators) and sex. Like a long hot summer, the plot meanders through daily events and combustible emotions, but gains depth with a prodigal’s return, a wedding, a marital separation, two deaths (spoiler alert: one is a dog), a sibling brawl, a botched shooting, and a surprising final twist. Writing with agility and empathy, Smith ends this atmospheric family saga on a note of reconciliation and forgiveness. Agent: Judith Weber, Sobel Weber Associates.

February 15, 2013
Amiable debut novel of life in the nonglitzy part of Florida, the swampy confines of the Georgia borderlands. Utina is a definitive backwater, literally. But it's close enough to Jacksonville and the interstate to be attractive as the site for potential development, a prospect that makes some of its oddball mix of residents very, very happy. From the best family around, Arla Bolton--she of the mangled foot, wherein hangs a tale--went off years before and married Dean Bravo, proving that good girls love bad boys and that, as her mother archly observes, "[l]ove won't be enough." Sure enough, years later, shiftless Dean now smells money in the air. He and Arla, meanwhile, have begat a far-flung family that, as one member puts it, is a "frigging pack of oddballs and failures for whom he'd been wrestling with shame and ambivalence his entire life." Well, so it is with all families. Other characters in Arla's orbit are clearly more worthy of a share, such as the rugged young man named Biaggio, who "was a handsome man, but so beaten. Oh, but they were all so beaten." In a slowly, gently unfolding comedy of manners, Smith skillfully sets multiple stories in motion, most, it seems, designed to showcase the vanity of human wishes. Smith is a kind and understanding creator, and even the most venal of her characters, we see, is just trying to get by--and usually not succeeding. In the end, Smith overlaps territory John Sayles explored in Sunshine State, but with a more generous sense of our foibles. It's a promising start--and a lot of fun.

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