RED IVY TEA

In Boyles’ novel set in 1975, one-acre subdivisions start popping up Springfield, North Carolina, affecting everyone’s lives.

The trouble starts when young Jasper Springfield, who’s eager to shed his farming dad’s limited worldview, decides to head off to college and sell approximately 44.86 acres of the old family homestead to developers. That decision paves the way for a new, massive housing development called Springfield Estates. The rural folk don’t like what’s happening and have a hard time comprehending it: “And can you imagine living packed together like sardines in a can, all jammed up beside each other like this?” one townsperson says. There are deeper concepts afoot in Boyles’ short vignettes. Each character grapples with profound issues of loss and decay; they live in loveless marriages, mourn their vanishing youth, contend with injuries and illnesses, or even contemplate ending it all. Boyles joins a rich tradition of writers examining the human impact of so-called progress in a wry, folksy manner that’s reminiscent of a bygone style of American literature. He sets the tone early with a look at Clara and Ellis Hienkle, the “only living couple in Springfield that was totally prepared for their death.” Ellis decides to buy a cemetery plot out near Highway 72; he views this purchase as pragmatic, but his wife Clara just views it as a “constant reminder for all the world to see that someday she would be going over to her eternal rest.” Sadly, a few of the townsfolk can’t wait for that rest to come, and that tragic reality informs Boyles’ suggestive title, which subtly evokes his playful approach to dark themes. However, although he’s clearly enjoying the comedy of adulterers seriously injuring themselves after a “quick leap out the window into the brick-lined flowerbed,” among other absurdities, readers may find it hard to maintain a smile amid the melancholia—but, this author seems to say, such is life.

A work of morbid humor that whistles past the cemetery gates.