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One Vacant Chair
by Tony Jefferson
Published: 2003-09-01
Hardcover : 273 pages
Hardcover : 273 pages
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A hilarious and irresistible new novel by Joe Coomer, whom The Washington Times calls "a marvelously creative comic writer"
It's where you sit down that determines everything in life.
Sarah's aunt Edna paints portraits of chairs. Not people in chairs, just chairs. The old house is filled ...
It's where you sit down that determines everything in life.
Sarah's aunt Edna paints portraits of chairs. Not people in chairs, just chairs. The old house is filled ...
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Introduction
A hilarious and irresistible new novel by Joe Coomer, whom The Washington Times calls "a marvelously creative comic writer"
It's where you sit down that determines everything in life.
Sarah's aunt Edna paints portraits of chairs. Not people in chairs, just chairs. The old house is filled with the paintings, and the chairs themselves surround her work-a silent yet vigilant audience. At the funeral of Grandma Hutton-whom Edna has cared for through an agonizingly long and vague illness-Sarah begins helping her aunt clean up the last of a life. This includes honoring Grandma's surprising wish to have her ashes scattered in Scotland.
"We were two fat women, eighteen years apart, a chair artist and a designer of Christmas ornaments, who only knew we had troubles and a hot summer to get through," says Sarah. But as it turns out, there is a great deal more to quirky Aunt Edna's troubles than Sarah could possibly imagine. As the novel turns from the hot, oppressive heat of Texas to the misty beauty of Scotland, she learns of her aunt's remarkable secret life and comes to fully understand the fragile business of living, and even of dying.
Praised for his richly drawn characters and as a master storyteller, Joe Coomer is at the height of his powers in One Vacant Chair.
Winner of the S. Mariella Gable Fiction Prize
It's where you sit down that determines everything in life.
Sarah's aunt Edna paints portraits of chairs. Not people in chairs, just chairs. The old house is filled with the paintings, and the chairs themselves surround her work-a silent yet vigilant audience. At the funeral of Grandma Hutton-whom Edna has cared for through an agonizingly long and vague illness-Sarah begins helping her aunt clean up the last of a life. This includes honoring Grandma's surprising wish to have her ashes scattered in Scotland.
"We were two fat women, eighteen years apart, a chair artist and a designer of Christmas ornaments, who only knew we had troubles and a hot summer to get through," says Sarah. But as it turns out, there is a great deal more to quirky Aunt Edna's troubles than Sarah could possibly imagine. As the novel turns from the hot, oppressive heat of Texas to the misty beauty of Scotland, she learns of her aunt's remarkable secret life and comes to fully understand the fragile business of living, and even of dying.
Praised for his richly drawn characters and as a master storyteller, Joe Coomer is at the height of his powers in One Vacant Chair.
Winner of the S. Mariella Gable Fiction Prize
Excerpt
Perhaps our lives are sustained by a suspense of dying. There are things I know and things I don’t know and everything else is in between. Grandma Hutton called Aunt Edna to her deathbed and then decided to linger for twenty-two years. She measured her life with spoons, the brimming spoons of medicine or milk or soup that my aunt balanced with a painter’s sure grip over her own cupped palm, her free hand mimicking in form and movement the dull spoon’s bowl, her arm the narrow handle. My grandmother, for the last few years of her life, answered the telephone as if she were standing at the mouth of a dark cave, halooing for a lost soul. When someone answered she was always taken aback. That’s how we talked to her at last, by phone, everyone but Aunt Edna. Then the family returned to Fort Worth for the funeral like separate drops of condensing water pooling in the bowl of a cold spoon, a last offering to an old dead woman none of us cared for. That’s not true. Aunt Edna missed her. ...
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