Wow. Great voice on this book. I loved it from the first page onward. This is a story told the way I like to listen. Yarborough tells an interwoven story well. It is perhaps a little overplayed, but the prose is so pleasant to read it becomes a minor criticism.
The title of this book could be "What Was I Thinking" and the subtitle would then be "I Wasn't". There are several layers of stories here. The historical context is the everyday man's response to what was changing in the South during the 1960's. The story itself is about the interconnectedness of small town life, and how two people who barely know each other can share a history that changes them and their families forever, and be completely unaware of it. And then there is the familiar story of a man cheating on his wife with another woman. This is the part of the story that I am most interested in how it is told, because it is the universal theme. What can we learn about how this happens? Yarborough's take on it is that when you put one foot in front of the other, when you take the next most natural step from where you are, and never raise your head up to look at the big picture that you end up in a place that you never intended to go, and with consequences that you have not realistically considered. Our hero in this novel actually spends a period of the novel convincing himself his affair is good for his marriage. He hasn't spent a bit of time considering that his wife might leave him, and he definitely hasn't thought about how his daughters would respond to his behavior.
Instead of the little picture, Luke focuses on a man killing his wife, and who knew what when. He plays the part of writer and historian, without ever connecting his modern affair with an affair of yore, and the role he plays in history repeating itself. This is a fabulous book and I highly recommend it.
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