Visits from the Drowned Girl

by Steven Sherrill

Book Overview

Benny Poteat is a tower jockey. Working hundreds of feet in the air repairingtension lines and replacing burnt-out light bulbs, he observes the world fromabove. Benny has seen a lot of things from his... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400061520
• ISBN13: 9781400061525
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: Random House
• Length: 241 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

I loved it.

This is a fantastic book about the effects of secrets on a persons life. When Benny Poteat witnesses a girl drown herself, he finds the video tapes and camera that she left behind. After an embarassing incident involving a stubbed toe and a chocolate penis he can't bring himself to report the death. To find out more about the girl who died he starts watching the tapes. He also meets and starts dating her midget sister. the book shifts effortlessly from moments of extreme darkness to great comedy (I laughed out loud when the dog chose the wrong moment to vomit up Becky's knickers). Benny is a strangely sympathetic central character despite his increasingly unforgivable behaviour. He certainly isn't likable but even his most unlikely actions seem reasonable when we look through his eyes. His voyeurism turns to outright cruelty by the end of the book as a side-effect of keeping the secret for so long. I cannot recommend this book enough. The prose style is hypnotic, the characters well drawn, sympathetic and believable, the dialogue crisp and frequently very funny, and the story flows with the force of the river the girl drowns herself in in chapter one. There is some detail which isn't for the squeamish but I ain't squeamish. An easy 5 stars

Dramatic Change

Steven Sherrill in his second book does something that very few modern writers are often willing to do, potentially alienate an audience. While stylistically similar to his first novel, the mood of the work takes a drastic turn. What it creates for the reader are two characters, one who embodies the positive qualities in a person and another the negative. After crafting the low but loveable Minotaur, a victim of society's prejudices and an everstanding tribute to the human spirit, he creates the yang to the Minotaur's yin with Benny Poteat. Benny Poteat embodies the negatives in us, our fear, our passivity, and our insincerity. While the Minotaur is reassuring, Benny is damning. Fans of the style and characters of the first book will have a better experience with this new novel, due to the greater refinement in characters (there are no more arbitrary villains like in Minotaur) and increased intensity of writing. However, fans expecting the same warm feeling left from the Minotaur will soon be crushed by the dark psychosis of this new protagonist.

A Southern Point of View

From the top of a watertower, Benny Poteat sees something he isn't suppose to see-a beautiful young woman, setting up a video camera, taking off her clothes, and then calmly walking into the water to drown. Benny nervously climbs down the tower making his way to the riverbank where it happened, knowing full well that it is too late to save her. He gathers her clothes, her video camera, and the video tapes left in her bag, tosses them into his pickup truck and rushes home dazed and frightened as though he had somehow caused her death. He turns one question over and over in his mind, "What do you do after watching someone die?" He doesn't go to the police, instead he keeps what he saw to himself. Paralyzed by a need to be close to the drowned girl he watches the video tapes she purposely left behind. Then he searches and finds the drowned girl's sister, Becky Hinkey. Yet, rather than telling Becky what he saw, he starts dating her. He holds her while she cries over her missing sister. He considers telling her what he saw. But then he wonders--has too much time past? Would it seem suspicious? Would it look as though he had something to do with it? His frustration builds, he wishes he had gone to the police, but he didn't and now he doesn't know what to do. He considers telling Jeeter, his best friend, "One time, when they were both drunk, Benny asked Jeeter if he believed in angels. `Shut-up, Benny.' That was the closest Benny ever came to talking about it." Sherrill's humor is steeped in southern literary tradition with its dark, grotesque quality. He carefully weaves the lives of his oddball characters to create a most believable and compelling story. Becky Hinkey, while the most normal of all the characters, is a midget. Jeeter is most at home on a motorcycle and in a flea market. He prefers spending his energies on rigging up a vibrating passenger seat on his motorcycle to arouse his female passengers. And then there's Doodle and Dink. Doodle, Benny's neighbor and a waitress at the Nub & Honey where he sometimes works. Dink, a friend with serious issues of his own. We laugh and sympathize with the midget stuffed in the giant pumpkin; we laugh and feel ill from the dog "sicking up" a pair of panties; we laugh and sympathize for Jeeter's date, who is deeply bruised by his vibrating seat device. Like the mischievous boy in second grade who always got away with shooting spitballs because he could charm the socks off the teacher, Sherrill's poetic style and ear for rhythm lets him get away with telling us anything he wants. [...]

Another work with strong characters.

Despite the dim, dark nature of Visits from the Drowned Girl, I have to say that the quality of the characters and the complexity of the relationships between them in this vision of the rural South intrigued me quite a bit throughout my read. Although thematically more difficult than Sherrill's previous novel The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, Visits attacks the difficulties of voyeurism and secret-sharing (or, in Benny Poteat's case, the difficulty of secret-revealing). Sherrill deftly handles the interweaving of Benny's desire to hoard the knowledge to himself and his guilt-ridden attempts to disclose the truth that is needed to be known by those who were close to the drowned girl. Benny's struggle to balance the weight of his secret and his desire for the drowned girl with the personal relationships that he carries on with the many colorful characters adds to the narrative force behind the work and drives you to read on through to the end. With Sherrill's poetic style at the helm, the tragedy and comedy of Benny Poteat's life, intermingled and, at times, indistinguishable, leads to a very interesting experience. Ultimately, this is a novel to read twice: once to get you through the gritty details of our inherent voyeuristic appeals, and second to process the way in which the story is told; to appreciate the narrative quality of Sherrill's text. Be warned that this is not an easy read. The characters are hard enough to be real. You can almost smell them coming off the page. Bravo! I look forward to his next novel.

Sherrill delivers another masterpiece

Steven Sherrill was widely acclaimed for his first novel, "The Minotaur takes a Cigarette Break". He has backed that one up with a solid second effort. He richly develops characters who are certainly frustrating at times. The book is a take on modern life wherein we tend to view real events as being nothing more than televised versions of the real thing, failing to interject ourselves when we can make a difference. The book also helps us to understand the consequences of those human failures. Indeed the book is at times depressing and bleak, but it is successful in bringing home the point that all of us have a bit of the "voyeur" in us and that there is no such thing as mere observation--that observation in and of itself actually affects the outcome of the situation being observed. Further, the characters are so richly developed that we understand that which seems beyond understanding, and as such can walk away with a better understanding of ourselves.