Charley Bland

by Mary Lee Settle

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.