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A review by jennyshank
The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schaffert
5.0
http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20110527-book-review-the-coffins-of-little-hope-by-timothy-schaffert.ece
The Coffins of Little Hope
by Timothy Schaffert
(Unbridled Books, $24.95)
Timothy Schaffert's fourth novel, The Coffins of Little Hope, is a the droll, gleefully morbid, and smart, droll and gleefully morbid story of an unsolved small-town mystery.
delivered by an The irresistible narrator is Essie Myles, a gimlet-eyed 83-year-old obituary writer who is the for the Nebraska town's newspaper, The County Paragraph. Essie is the who Essie counts herself among the Nebraska town's “death merchants” (along with the undertaker, organist, florist, and cemetery caretaker), and she is also the beloved matriarch of an unconventional family. Her Essie's husband died young, as did her son and his wife; her grandson, Doc, took over as publisher of the Nebraska town’s newspaper, The County Paragraph, from his father, and he also took over raising his sister Ivy's daughter, Tiff, when Ivy followed a lover to Paris. and stayed there for several years.
Essie, Tiff and Doc find themselves at the center of a series of strange eventsin their town. One day, when the town's misfit, Daisy, reports that her lover Elvis, a door-to-door aerial photography salesman, and her daughter, a child no one knew existed, have vanished. The missing girl, like the missing sweetheart in Poe's “The Raven,” is named Lenore. No evidence that any child ever lived in Daisy's farmhouse is found, and Daisy is considered just crazy enough to have made the whole thing up.
But Daisy maintains she's telling the truth, the story captures the country's morbid fascination with missing children, and the County Paragraph's subscription rolls swell as people all over the world clamor to learn more.
Essie develops a following for her obituaries, and one of her fans is the author of an enormously popular 11-book series, that, like Harry Potter, has so imbued the popular culture that even those who resisted reading these books are aware of their contents: “Many otherwise stable men and women well into their forties still feel struck with the heebie-jeebies when they recall the gothic predicaments of the two sisters, Miranda and Desiree, the innocent wards of Rothgutt's Asylum for Misguided Girls.” Essie carries on a secret correspondence with the author, who wrote her a fan letter, even while the County Paragraph's printer turns out top-secret copies of the 11th book in the series. In order to avoid leaks, the book's publisher hired small-town presses to covertly print the novel.
A cult of Lenore enthusiasts, whom Tiff calls “the Lenorians,” emerges and some townspeople make money off “the sad pilgrims who skulked in and out.” This would seem a humorous exaggeration, except that it's not much of a stretcher. In Boulder, Colo., for a time, stores catering to the tourist trade sold purses printed with JonBenet Ramsey's likeness. Indeed, The Coffins of Little Hope seems to have been inspired by JonBenet Ramsey-type incidents, the Harry Potter craze crossed with Lemony Snicket-like gothic subject matter, reality TV, and tabloid journalism, but Schaffert miraculously transforms this heap of contemporary junk culture into durable art.
The Coffins of Little Hope is packed with insights about aging, death, the disappearance of newspapers (“How does a town even know what it is, or who's in it, if there's no newspaper?” Essie says), and contemporary life. Willa Cather enthusiasts who have made the trek to Red Cloud will enjoy Schaffert's bits about the famous dead Nebraska writer Myrna Kingley Fitch, whose foundation has been “saving [her] dying rural town by killing it, inch by inch, and casting it in amber.” The Coffins of Little Hope is warm and wise, demonstrating that Schaffert is a writer who can laugh at and love his characters in equal measure.
Jenny Shank's first novel, “The Ringer,” was published this spring. She is the Books & Writers Editor of NewWest.Net.
[email protected]
“The Coffins of Little Hope,” by Timothy Schaffert is a smart, droll and entertaining small-town mystery. The author takes a mishmash of cultural references — from JonBenet Ramsey to Willa Cather to Harry Potter and even the death of newspapers — and turns it into something solid.
The Coffins of Little Hope
by Timothy Schaffert
(Unbridled Books, $24.95)
Timothy Schaffert's fourth novel, The Coffins of Little Hope, is a the droll, gleefully morbid, and smart, droll and gleefully morbid story of an unsolved small-town mystery.
delivered by an The irresistible narrator is Essie Myles, a gimlet-eyed 83-year-old obituary writer who is the for the Nebraska town's newspaper, The County Paragraph. Essie is the who Essie counts herself among the Nebraska town's “death merchants” (along with the undertaker, organist, florist, and cemetery caretaker), and she is also the beloved matriarch of an unconventional family. Her Essie's husband died young, as did her son and his wife; her grandson, Doc, took over as publisher of the Nebraska town’s newspaper, The County Paragraph, from his father, and he also took over raising his sister Ivy's daughter, Tiff, when Ivy followed a lover to Paris. and stayed there for several years.
Essie, Tiff and Doc find themselves at the center of a series of strange eventsin their town. One day, when the town's misfit, Daisy, reports that her lover Elvis, a door-to-door aerial photography salesman, and her daughter, a child no one knew existed, have vanished. The missing girl, like the missing sweetheart in Poe's “The Raven,” is named Lenore. No evidence that any child ever lived in Daisy's farmhouse is found, and Daisy is considered just crazy enough to have made the whole thing up.
But Daisy maintains she's telling the truth, the story captures the country's morbid fascination with missing children, and the County Paragraph's subscription rolls swell as people all over the world clamor to learn more.
Essie develops a following for her obituaries, and one of her fans is the author of an enormously popular 11-book series, that, like Harry Potter, has so imbued the popular culture that even those who resisted reading these books are aware of their contents: “Many otherwise stable men and women well into their forties still feel struck with the heebie-jeebies when they recall the gothic predicaments of the two sisters, Miranda and Desiree, the innocent wards of Rothgutt's Asylum for Misguided Girls.” Essie carries on a secret correspondence with the author, who wrote her a fan letter, even while the County Paragraph's printer turns out top-secret copies of the 11th book in the series. In order to avoid leaks, the book's publisher hired small-town presses to covertly print the novel.
A cult of Lenore enthusiasts, whom Tiff calls “the Lenorians,” emerges and some townspeople make money off “the sad pilgrims who skulked in and out.” This would seem a humorous exaggeration, except that it's not much of a stretcher. In Boulder, Colo., for a time, stores catering to the tourist trade sold purses printed with JonBenet Ramsey's likeness. Indeed, The Coffins of Little Hope seems to have been inspired by JonBenet Ramsey-type incidents, the Harry Potter craze crossed with Lemony Snicket-like gothic subject matter, reality TV, and tabloid journalism, but Schaffert miraculously transforms this heap of contemporary junk culture into durable art.
The Coffins of Little Hope is packed with insights about aging, death, the disappearance of newspapers (“How does a town even know what it is, or who's in it, if there's no newspaper?” Essie says), and contemporary life. Willa Cather enthusiasts who have made the trek to Red Cloud will enjoy Schaffert's bits about the famous dead Nebraska writer Myrna Kingley Fitch, whose foundation has been “saving [her] dying rural town by killing it, inch by inch, and casting it in amber.” The Coffins of Little Hope is warm and wise, demonstrating that Schaffert is a writer who can laugh at and love his characters in equal measure.
Jenny Shank's first novel, “The Ringer,” was published this spring. She is the Books & Writers Editor of NewWest.Net.
[email protected]
“The Coffins of Little Hope,” by Timothy Schaffert is a smart, droll and entertaining small-town mystery. The author takes a mishmash of cultural references — from JonBenet Ramsey to Willa Cather to Harry Potter and even the death of newspapers — and turns it into something solid.