Reynolds

By Donley Watt

Reynolds is a forty-something liquor-store owner on Clear Creek Lake, near Cottonwood, in East Texas. Once he was a banker, but the real estate scandals of the '80s taught him he had trusted the wrong people and brought him within a hair of an indictment. Once he had a wife and twin sons, but she left after the scandal, taking the boys to her daddy's ranch in West Texas. Now Reynolds owns Lake Country Liquor Store and lives in a trailer behind the store, with several women passing through his life for intermittent periods. He's satisfied--but a little dissatisfied. Reynolds also has a weird family from whom he's mostly estranged. His mother, Edwina, is a bible beater, fond of giving sermonettes to Reynolds, her oldest son who has strayed from the church and lived in sin with women. His brother, Perry, is a survivalist with a stash of AK47s and other automatic weapons that he sells illegally from time to time. Perry also teaches government at the local high school, but his job is in peril because he's been teaching his own anti-government views. And Perry has a dark secret hidden in his past. Ray Reynolds Sr. is a retired Ford truck dealer who's bent on inventing a perpetual motion machine and leaves his wife to live as a hermit at the lake and focus on his invention. The palpable tension between the brothers makes this in part a Cain-and-Abel story. Perry has always been the good son, but Reynolds learns more than he almost wants to know about his brother. And though they fight--at least once physically--they remain brothers, with the distance between them balanced by their sense of family loyalty. There is laughter in these pages in wry, witty dialogue and raw self-honesty, and there is suspense in Perry's late-night gun deals, which he conducts on the boat ramp by Reynolds's store, without Reynolds's knowledge. But there's also a real sense of people with frailties and weaknesses and dreams and hopes, for themselves and for their family. Donley Watt captures small-town East Texas, its attitudes and habits and language, with a masterful sense of place. His rednecks are as real as his Dallas lady and his Austin vegetarian. Reynolds and his family draw you into their story until you can't leave and you'll find yourself turning pages rapidly at the end, desperate to know what happens to them. And whether Reynolds will ever truly be happy with his life.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0875652565
• ISBN13: 9780875652566
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: Texas Christian University Press
• Length: 191 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Waiting for Joy

Here's what I've been harvesting lately from movies, tv shows, and fiction: the value of witnessing characters who struggle with their problems but are unable to see what it is in their make-up that makes the struggle so hard. The audience can see it, but the character can't. I won't stay with stories where the myopia's artificial, where the author seems to be pointlessly tormenting her characters with awkwardly contrived boils and toils. I'm engaged by writers and directors who present this struggle with authenticity. I imagine exposure to this quality of fiction might help me with my own struggles. If you're into that, I recommend Donley Watts' new novel, Reynolds.A little bit of word play in the opening sentence of Reynolds made me smile, chuckle to myself. It seemed incidental then but when I finished the novel, it seemed to contain the whole story. The title character is goofing around in his liquor store after closing. Ray Reynolds is listening to music, sliding around in his sock feet, and waiting for his lady friend, whose name is Joy.Waiting for Joy.Waiting for joy?Turned out not to be that much joyful about Joy. Downright sad, really. Not much joy for Joy, or Reynolds, or for many of the other characters who experienced the beautifully rendered cycles of East Texas seasons with them. Too much waiting, not enough joy.Reynolds' mom was waiting for leaf-raking to rise higher on her husband's priority list than it would on hers. To Edwina's credit, she finally stopped waiting. Unfortunately for her beautifully shaded back yard and the fortunes of at least one blue jay (and maybe Edwina herself), she didn't stop waiting soon enough for a half-measure or even a simple full measure to satisfy her need for action.Reynold's dad stopped waiting too. Ray senior stopped waiting for the marital tension to resolve itself under the roof of the neglected old house, stopped waiting for his improbable gift to the world to drag itself from under a dusty tarp and finish inventing itself.My guess is that Reynold's brother Perry is still waiting for Armageddon to come and promote him to his rightful stature among men. Despite an epiphany that pointed to action, I think Perry's wife Beth might still be waiting for her husband to share his inner life with her.And Reynolds is still waiting for the right woman to walk through the door of his liquor store on a remote lake, instead of figuring out what he wants and going out to get it. We can see that; Reynolds can't.