Understanding Women

For review from Fort Worth Star-Telegram, go here

For review from Booklist, go here

For review from Dallas Morning News 9/27/98 go here

Winner of the 1998 Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Novel from the Texas Institute of Letters.

Winner of the Border Regional Library Association Award for Outstanding Book about the Southwest.
 

"It’s 1956, and James Robert (Jimbo) Proctor’s just turned sixteen when his uncle Waylan and his new wife Vicky invite him to spend a summer toiling in the New Mexico oil patch. Jimbo dreams that heaving heavy metal about will serve as well as a Charles Atlas course to make a man of him, but he lands smack dab into a domestic fracus that has his uncle living in his machine shop and sneaking out with Sharon, his secretary. Meanwhile, Jimbo’s aunt Vicky leads a protest against a fundamentalist book-ban and rails against American H-bomb tests on Bikini. James sets out to solve the case of what he calls The Hardy Boy and the Mystery of the Marital Estrangement, but when he meets Sharon’s cousin, Trudy, and plummets into love himself, the mystery of what brings men and women together or keeps them apart only deepens into confusion and torment. And James has more to learn than why we love and how we earn a mate both deserved and deserving. He’s coming of age in a pivotal year in an era of repression and transition: the Brown decision, hardly two years old, meets die-hard resistance among segregationists; Rosa Parks has just refused to take a back seat; playwright Arthur Miller marries Marilyn Monroe and gets a contempt citation from the House Un-American Activities Committee; Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver lose in a landslide to Ike and Dick Nixon; Ed Sullivan claims he’ll never let Elvis "the Pelvis" on his TV show, and a Southern Senator warns Americans against the insidious influence of "foreign" films. In Jimbo’s hometown of Dallas right-wing complaints of "Red" artists succeed in censoring a traveling art show sponsored by the United States Information Agency; civil defense drills sweep the nation to prepare Americans for nuclear war; sponsor General Electric withdraws an episode of the wildly popular drama "Medic" because it reveals too much about a Cesarean section, and abortions are so forbidden even descriptions of them are stricken from books. How such things -- things he might’ve thought remote and irrelevant -- come to bear heavily on his green life is the thrust of his summer’s true education, and he leaves on the cusp not so much of manhood but of adult responsibility. ·

"C.W. Smith’s Understanding Women is a great, big-hearted novel that captures the sweetness of innocence lost and the irrevocability of wisdom found. With its double-edged title, it can sneak through customs as a hot, self-help book for lonely losers, but when you read it, you realize it is all that and so much more. I hope it’s the roaring success it deserves to be." – Sarah Bird, author of The Mommy Club and Virgin at the Rodeo.

"C.W. Smith’s Understanding Women is a well-wrought coming-of-age novel set in Texas and New Mexico in the 1950s, replete with the classic yearnings and angst of a teen-aged boy eager to learn lessons of love and life he often finds difficult if puzzling. Smith’s tale rings true as to the repressive politics of the time and place as his young protagonist, adrift in an oil-field culture, gropes with the pains and pangs of growing up." Larry L. King, author of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas; Kingfish; and The Night Hank Williams Died.

"This is a loving and courageous novel, rich in humor, savvy, sex and a social conscience. There’s a sweet sorrow in it like Tender Mercies, and a wonderful adolescent’s yearning that shapes the prose, helping it to soar. C.W. Smith is a gentle magician: he has created a beautiful work of art." – John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War, The Magic Journey, and Conjugal Bliss.

To order:

Thin Men of Haddam, Letters From the Horse Latitudes, Hunter's Trap, or Understanding Women call University Publishing at 1-800-826-8911. Or search under "exact author's name" as "C.W. Smith" at Amazon.com.

For excerpts and catalogue copy and ordering, visit the TCU Press website: wwwprs.tcu.edu/

For ordering Buffalo Nickel (Pocket Books edition), see www.amazon.com