The Curtain of Hope

Great trouble requires but a small place. In a small dying town in Southeastern Georgia, three lifelong friends reunite to save their home and themselves. Each is facing middle age in self-imposed loneliness. Faris Turner, prodigal son of the town patriarch, has never sustained a job or a personal life worthy of the name. Sister Angeline Bruce, a former nun with a dark secret, runs the local food bank and acts as the town conscience. Henry Jeffords, retired schoolmaster and resident intellectual, owns a bookstore that is the putative hub of municipal renaissance. The book opens with a calamitous fire that claims the life of Faris' father, leaving the town bereft of moral leadership. It is but the first in a chain of calamities, including murder, accidental electrocution, criminal vandalism in a roadside wildlife attraction, fraud in the white-owned funeral home, and the collapse of municipal institutions critical to the survival of the town. The three friends, who plot to spark a public dialogue about the town's collective future, instead unleash a bitter battle over the injustices of small town life. In response, the townspeople momentarily embrace unreasonable hope, which morphs into recrimination, sabotage and vengeance. Racism, class prejudice, greed, snobbery, petty villainy, and the desperate effort to replace traditional rural life all play a part in the town's collective undoing. These three solitaries, through their bumbling leadership, play out a farce in which the road to hell truly is paved with good intentions. In The Curtain of Hope, our protagonists take for themselves by ostensibly giving to others, unaware of the price of real social obligation and ignorant of the consequences of their actions. Each of them is undone by their self-regarding altruism. Set in a changing South unrepresented in regional stereotypes, The Curtain of Hope is a book in which place is also a principal character. It addresses eternal themes: the necessity and illusion of hope, the claustrophobia of small places, the anxiety of middle age, and how the individual addresses isolation in a crowd of others.