Going » (1)

Kevin Oderman, professor of English and creative writing at West Virginia University, is the author of the prize-winning collection of literary essays How Things Fit Together and a critical book on Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium. He has twice taught abroad as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer, first in Thessaloniki, Greece, and subsequently in Lahore, Pakistan. Going is his first novel.

Heir to an expat literary tradition that includes the work of Ernest Hemingway, Lawrence Durrell, Graham Greene, and Paul Bowles, Kevin Oderman's Going combines a love story and a tale of intrigue in a narrative of surprising twists that illuminate the moral quandaries faced by the main characters.

In Granada, a boy in a dress begs in the white alleys of the old town. A runaway and vulnerable, he turns for protection to an American painter, Madeleine James, who is living in the city, and to her new friend, the poet Cy Jacobs. Although the two adults mean to help the boy, they unwittingly expose him to more peril. Soon all the characters in the story have been scraped on the touchstone of hard realities and made to show their mettle, be it base or gold. At times somber and at times flaring with intensity, Kevin Oderman's Going calls up indelibly the difficulties of making a good life--and in Cy's case, a good death--in a world in which we are all, in one way or another, going.