Charley Bland

In this moving and brilliant narrative of doomed love, Mary Lee Settle tells a triangular affair set in the small town of Canona, West Virginia. The novel's narrator, a thirty-five-year-old widow and writer, returns from a self-imposed European exile to find her hometown much as she left it decades ago. One thing does change upon her arrival, however; she takes Charley Bland, Canona's most eligible bachelor and the object of her schoolgirl crush, as her lover. The third person in the profane trinity is Charley's doting mother, a woman who believes no female worthy of her son. Mrs. Bland serves to fuel the creativity of the lovers as they arrange clandestine meetings. With trademark skill and wit, Settle spins a bittersweet story in which she reveals the mores of Canona's closed, upper-class society and of its less prosperous underculture. She artfully employs a mixture of humor, compassion, satire, and irony to perform a dissection of family existence at its most corrosive.