Understanding Women
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.
Jacket Copy:
"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. ·
Praise For Understanding Women –
"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 read chapters of
Understanding Women, click Chapter
One.
FULL TEXT OF REVIEWS OF UNDERSTANDING
WOMEN:
Review of
Understanding Women in Library Journal
Review of Understanding
Women in Rapport
Review of
Understanding Women in Texas Books in Review
Review of
Understanding Women in Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Review of Understanding
Women in Booklist
Review of
Understanding Women in San Antonio Express-News
Review of
Understanding Women in Texas Observer
Review of
Understanding Women in Austin American-Statesman
Review of
Understanding Women in Dallas Morning News
Review of
Understanding Women in Publishers Weekly
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
Return to Fiction Content Index
or Home
