Country Music — C.W. Smith

C.W. Smith's Country Music is a raw comic romp that offers up a shrewd anatomy of sexual and social stances. It opens when Bobby Joe Gilbert, Hedorville's Bane to Virgins and Most Unlikely to Succeed, confronts an unwelcome question: "What are you going to do with yourself?" Desperate to escape his reputation and his limited world, he makes a stab at college, but the effort dissipates in endless pinball games and a stormy friendship with a lesbian who resists his sexual advances and penetrates his psychic defenses. He weds a gorgeous blonde who epitomizes his macho notions of womanhood, but the marriage soon goes sour. Warily, he returns to small-town Hedorville and to the same-old suffocating crowd - and also to his responsibility for the death of a girl who trusted him, the ugly secret he must face. The women in Bobby Joe's life - Pinball Polly, his wife Ginger, and Nelda Sue, the girl he keeps coming back to - are deftly created characters. They and a host of others bring a whole world unforgettably to life. This ebook edition includes the author's essay about working in Hollywood on the novel's film adaptation. “Smith's portrait of a troubled young man searching for himself he knows not where… is alive, funny, sad, and as real as it can be.” �" Publisher's Weekly