Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock

by Jack Butler

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140237135
• ISBN13: 9780140237139
• Release Date: July 1994
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 672 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Get Ready...

This book takes the six guitar strings that travel the length of your torso. Then it alternately plays on the fretboard of your intellect, strums your heart, and grabs your whammy bar. Buy a copy for yourself. Then buy one for everyone you know who doesn't believe in the transformative powers of fiction; everyone you know who believes the novel is dead; and anyone who needs to have the focus of their worldview adjusted to sharpen the magic and blur the ordinary.

A Rollicking Metafictional Tour-de-Force

The other reviews on this page are well-put, but this novel is much more than regional work or a humorous look at the early 80s. What's it about? Everything. Mysticism, sex, and death. And it's hilarious. Because things are funny in direct proportion to their gravity. I can never teach a class on the American Novel again without somehow dealing with this book, and the sooner it's back in print, the better.

A non-American Writes

LLR (to use the author's own shorthand) is a book to be reread. It bursts with linguistic and literary trickery: a Finnegan's Wake for this generation. It swoops between characters and narrative devices with virtuousity, and leaves memory trails long after you have finished. Make no mistake, this is a difficult book to read. However since when does difficulty have anything to do with artistic merit, and this is a work of art. It evokes a now distant past of unforgotten history, though we may not wish to recall some of it. The Morrisons' are upwardly mobile, enlightened liberals (a dirty word now) who are targetted by all manner of evils. You should discover the plot yourself and in doing so discover perhaps the most talented of current writers: a Burgess like love of language; A Joycean eye for invention. Each character is complete, believable, and has their own voice: Lianne's stilted thought process; Laugh's self awareness; even the dog. Embedded in this murderous plot are sacred homilies: "...he could have touched if touch was touch was all...", touching personlities and a sense of conteporaneity. This is perhaps the great American novel, something which none of the great American novellists has yet produced. And it took a poet to do it.

Good and Evil in Little Rock

I don't intend this to be a full review. There are some interesting points to make about this book. They are as much about Little Rock as about the book, but since the book has so much to do with Little Rock itself (actual and symbolic), I do not think they are out of order here.Butler's use of Little Rock as the location for this novel makes the work exceptional. Little Rock is an extraordinary city with an extraordinary history. As a native Arkansan and former long-time Little Rock resident, I believe Little Rock to have been one of the south's most progressive cities. Some would say it was because of this progressive nature that Little Rock was chosen as the place to make the first major move to integrate public schools. Little Rock and Arkansas have fostered exceptional national leaders: William Fulbright (despite his positions on integration), Dale Bumpers, David Pryor, and, yes, Bill Clinton, as well as others.At the same time, Little Rock has been yanked violently backward by other Arkansas forces, often in the form of self-serving politicians. This often dramatic interplay between good and evil in Little Rock sets the stage for this tale which, I believe is symbolic of the south and of our nation.The book presents so very clearly the contrasts which we allow in our world. (In a sense we allow them and in a sense we battle them, but they flourish, so I believe "allow" is apt.) Little Rock and Arkansas elected a Bill Clinton (perhaps not the best example of progressive leadership, but good enough for this argument) and they elected a legislature and another governor who voted in a creation science bill--the bill and associated trial which figure prominently in the book. Little Rock and Arkansas elected wise and thoughtful leaders such as Dale Bumpers; they also engaged in an extended flirtation with a high-profile sheriff known for chaining prisoners to the fence of a State prison, sporting a pump shotgun on television spots, and engaging in bizarre witch-hunting investigations. (This sheriff also figures prominently in the book.)Perhaps the contrast and irony is more muted elsewhere, but in Little Rock it is vibrantly clear. Unlike the Alabama reviewer, I do think this book captures a true sense of a progressive and tragically flawed city. But then, is Little Rock all that different from the rest of the nation? Not so very different, I think. The contrast is just so much clearer in Little Rock, atleast it was at the time at which Butler set his story. This contrast, really a balance, is so fragile. Butler plays this out over and over in the book. People with bright futures face destruction because of almost coincidental brushes with evil. This book isn't about characters who take on evil. I don't view them as taking courageous stands; they are forced to react to the evil which overtakes them. If the protagonist does have a fatal flaw, it is his obliviousness. But then, when we delightedly e

A great book, especially if you like to think

Imagine you're a dinner guest. Your host has blindfolded you and is feeding you one bite at a time from an unseen table. Each mouthful is different and seems to follow some pattern. Some of the foods you've tasted before, but never prepared like this. It is as if you have entered another level of cusine--the food is familiar but the preparation is unique to you. In addition, just when you think you've figured out a pattern of what the stranger is going to pop in your mouth next (a lemon chocolate) you get something shockingly different(a spoonfull of cranberry sauce). This is what its like reading this tale of millionare lawyer Charles Morrison and his wife, the former Miss Little Rock as told by the most omniscient of narrators, the Holy Spirit. The foppish Kirkus Review of this book would have you believe this book was long and boring. While it may be the former, it is NEVER the latter. Infact, you don't notice the length because it is so engrossing. When you have finished this crime story/love story/psychodrama/journalistic study of political arkansas/postmodernistic novel, you'll have felt like you've lived through something intense and powerful that words can't quite describe. Perhaps like falling through a rainbow of emotions, hitting each color of the emotional spectrum as you go through; as if one had a video tape and was fast forwarding through all of the sensations one can go through in a year. I can't compare it to any book, because it is nothing like I've ever read. I've read this book three times now and it has gotten better with every reading.