Visits from the Drowned Girl

Benny Poteat is a voyeur, happy to paint the tops of water tanks, change light bulbs on communication towers, and do steeple maintenance hundreds of feet above the ground, far from real life. After witnessing a young woman's suicide, Benny rushes down from his perch, removes all traces of the girl, but inexplicably keeps videotapes she made before she died. While obsessively watching her videos, he gets involved with her family, never letting them know what happened to her. Holter Graham's narration is particularly effective in this way offbeat story. His whispery voice crawls inside the listener's head and rolls around like Benny's secret thoughts or, if he had one, his conscience. Steven Sherrill's second novel is unrelentingly dark, exploring the perverse side of human behavior. Graham's performance is chilling. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

March 29, 2004
A starred review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of unusual commercial interest that hasn't received a starred or boxed review.

VISITS FROM THE DROWNED GIRL
Steven Sherrill
. Random
, $24.95 (256p) ISBN 1-4000-6152-0

The fictional North Carolina-ish town of Buffalo Shoals is a microcosm of the New South—a yuppified university district with a pretentious art scene and alternative newspaper, surrounded by a white trash hinterland where people have names like Doodle and Jeeter and the Pentecostal church sits next to the Triple-X Drive-In. Sherrill explored this terrain in his well-received The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break
, and in this funny, bleak and poetic novel he again invests it with a mythic resonance. The story unfolds through the eyes of broadcast tower repairman Benny Poteat, resigned to his feckless blue-collar life until one day he sees a woman set up a video camera and then drown herself in a rain-swollen river. Ashamed of his own passivity in the face of tragedy, Benny becomes obsessed with the enigmatic videotapes she left behind on the riverbank. As he delves into her life, the woman—a preacher's daughter turned avant-garde video artiste—becomes an embodiment of the social contradictions of Buffalo Shoals and a touchstone for Benny's own lonely sense of being an ineffectual observer of life. Sherrill paints a wryly humorous, bawdy, scatological panorama of Southern culture, full of kitsch and color but suffused with a hangdog irony. More than that, his limpid, naturalistic prose, woven with symbolic structure and philosophical insinuation, conveys a subtly convincing sense of the enervating voyeurism of modern life. Agent, Simon Lipskar at Writers House
. (June 8)

Forecast:
The college town setting and brainy outsider perspective make this an especially good pick for campus bookstores. 10-city author tour.