Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock

Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock is a rollicking, explosively inventive novel about God, sex, death, and politics in Bill Clinton country. It's a love story, a murder mystery, and a soap opera of the new American South. It's a metafictional tour de force, narrated by none other than the Holy Ghost, that Shade-About-Town. Little Rock in 1981: Charles Morrison is king of the hill. In his early forties, fit and handsome, he's a millionaire lawyer at home among.

The good old boys, who don't seem to mind that he's a science fiction buff and an atheist (the Holy Ghost gets a kick out of that one). Very possibly a future governor, he likes to think of himself as the "Atticus Finch of Arkansas," and he knows he's a fool for love. In particular, he's a fool for the love of his wife, Lianne. Most of the time. When they aren't fighting. She's a locally famous former tv newscaster, the Miss Little Rock of "nineteen-sixty-oops."

Nowadays, she's a MoSL - that's modern Southern liberal - putting all her energy into good causes, political activism, and Charles. The Morrisons are the golden couple of Little Rock, and the face of Arkansas's future ... if they can survive that long. Trouble is, there's trouble in River City. The state legislature has just enacted the Creation Science bill, and the town is sizzling with debate (God 1, Darwin 0). The Morrisons have begun a crusade against the bill.

And the Lord High Bailiff - one Sonny Raymond, a cracker with an attitude and his own gubernatorial ambitions - is hell-bent on making them pay. It doesn't help that Charles's firm is suddenly suffering from bad PR: junior partners seem to be throwing wild parties and wilder punches for the benefit of the police and the press. All Lianne wants is peace and satisfaction, the right ratio of private play and public works to keep the haunting memories of her childhood at bay.

(And too bad if that sometimes means keeping Charles at bay, too). Recently, though, she has discovered in herself a fearsome sense, of the sixth kind, that something terrible is going to happen. Is it a flare-up from her terrible past? Is Charles betraying her with Tina Tolliver, the blond bombshell in his firm? Maybe it's Tina's current lover, Laugh Thompson, the black "ex-Razorback football Hog" who's in line for a partnership if he can just keep the Good Suit Club.

Happy. Or is it something else, something a lot worse? The only one who knows for sure is the Holy Ghost and He - She? It? - isn't telling. The Ghost is more concerned with what we know about love, zen, money, and the reality of fiction ("Just how alive are these bozos, anyway?"). So Charles and Lianne will have to work it all out for themselves. But not before we are treated to an epic, hilarious, and continually surprising guided tour through the bedrooms, bars.

Courts, and natural wonders of Little Rock, and the state of the state of being in Arkansas.