Rides of the Midway

by Lee Durkee

Book Overview

Meet Mississippi teenager Noel Weatherspoon: ghost-seeing insomniac, endearing dopehead, wanna-be erotic photographer, and possible Baptist faith healer. Noel, who prefers The Exorcist to Ecclesiastes, must navigate a world of Bible-thumpers, born-again Christians, and a stepfather who bears an uncanny resemblance to Billy Graham. Darkly comic and lyrically moving, Rides of the Midway introduces a formidable talent in contemporary fiction.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393322904
• ISBN13: 9780393322903
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 322 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

a brilliant surprise of a story

Lee Durkee is a brilliant storyteller. I laughed with recognition at his hip, harried, 1970's mothers. I cried at the incredibly detailed, pitch-perfect tension Durkee reveals between blood brothers and ideas about prayer in this Mississippi town. Rides of the Midway transcends geography in its dreamy interludes, breadth of expression, and quality of language. I love how often the most reckless characters are also unexpectedly thoughtful. Noel Weatherspoon is drawn with the red-achey squint of every charming pothead, and moral burdens ascribed more often to soldiers than to kids. The beauty of this book is in the depth of attention paid to the smallest moments of joy and danger in the lives of children and their parents, the moments in which peace of mind vanishes and revelation comes too fast, or just soon enough to offer up a welcome surprise.

An Amazing Debut Novel -- Read it!

First let me first dispense with all the clichéd praise. The voice is absolutely pitch-perfect. The sentences are miracles. The characters - all of them - are honest and fully realized. And Durkee nails the era and the place. The book is funny, sad, sexy and scary, seamlessly. What I kept thinking while reading it was this: HOW...DID HE WRITE THIS BOOK? It is SO self-assured, so rock-solid and balls-out RIGHT, that I was sort of flabberghasted by it. Every 30 or so pages, I'd think - this is great, but how can the author possible keep this up? But he did, right to the end. Lee Durkee rang the bell with this one. Buy it and read it, then tell your best friend to do the same.

New American Mythmaking Classic

Lee Durkee's excellent book shows that American life can still be changed into a mythic journey, a deep exploration of life, and not the meer sheen of cosmetic consurmist angst. In what the author describes as a cautionary tale, we see a web of sorrow nearly trap Noel Witherspoon. He has been gifted with some supernatural powers, but has no clue as how to use them, he is attractive to women, but he can't consumate, he loves his youngest brother, but is at fault for his death. Like, his mis-placed friend Tim, Noel is too big for the town to contain, and his energy spills onto everyone he meets. An apocalytic vision of dysfunction, a withering look at American, and not just southern ideas of goodness, an expose of the ignorance and superstition that still drives us like catnip entralls a cat, Rides of the Midway moves like a juggernaut, until Noel Witherspoon, Great American Sinner, is free of his past, his town, and himself.

A funny, great read

I really loved this book--it's kind of a ghost story, murder mystery, and bildungsroman all wrapped into one. It's refreshing to read a book by a Southern writer who doesn't sugar-coat the South with too much reverence and nostalgia; Durkee's portrait is realistic and unsentimental. In one passage, Noel, the book's narrator, says, "Okay, say some guy spends his whole life murdering people, like Hitler, where does he go after he dies?" "That's easy," Tim [Noel's friend and one of the few Jewish kids in town] replied. "Mississippi." Durkee renders his story with compassion and truth. It's a funny, smart, well-crafted novel.

Destined To Be A Southern Classic!

If you are the reader who avoids first time novelists for fear you'll like them too much and then have to wait too long for their next book if there ever is one to follow, then you will certainly be depriving yourself of a wonderful "southern lit" classic-to-be written by first-time novelist Lee Durkee. His writing is as haunting as Tennessee Williams, but as comical as Flannery O'Connor. I was constantly reminded of the young male character, Joel Knox, created by the one and only Truman Capote in Tru's first novel (Other Voices, Other Rooms). Durkee writes with the same sense of almost supernatural intensity and audacious foray that Capote shows in his earlier writings. I was also reminded of several other first novels, including the hard-to-find Pryor Rendering written by Gary Reed. Like Reed, Durkee uses the southern setting to its full potential. His teen character, Noel Weatherspoon, is a complex individual that will haunt the reader far after they've reached the last page. Much like novelist Brian Pera's character, Earl, in Troublemaker, Durkee has created a character that does more than lift himself off the page with life. Noel is a complex individual that exists in all of us in some way. His adventures, thoughts, fears, and dreams will all become part of the reader if they are not already. I have nothing but praise for Lee Durkee and his first novel, Rides of the Midway. If not on its way to being a bestseller, it will be a southern lit classic that should be required reading everywhere.