Taps
A Novel
by Willie Morris

List Price: $13.00
Pages: 352
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0618219021
Publisher: Mariner Books

The final work from one of America's most beloved authors and an instant classic, Taps takes readers on one last fictional journey to Willie Morris's South and spins a tender, powerful, very American story about the vanishing beauty of a charmed way of life and the fleeting boyhood of a young man coming of age in a time of war. In Fisk’s Landing, Mississippi, at the dawn of the Korean War, sixteen-year-old Swayze Barksdale is suddenly called to an unexpected duty - playing "Taps" at the gravesides of the town’s young casualties sent home from the front. Gradually, Swayze begins to pace his life around these all too frequent funerals, where his horn sounds the tragic note of the times. At turns funny, at turns poignant, Taps abounds with colorful characters and yet "sings and sighs . . . with a kind of minor key wistfulness" (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette) as Swayze learns what it means to be a patriot, a son, a lover, a friend, a man.

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1. Taps opens with this description of Fisk's Landing: "The hills came sweeping down from their hardwood forests and challenged the flatness, mingling with it in querulous juxtaposition" (p. 1). How is landscape, particularly the relationship between the flatlands and the hills, important to the story? How are the characters shaped by the land around them?

2. When recalling his father's death Swayze remarks, "Selective memory is a human trait, and memory itself, I have learned, is the 'corrector is existence'" (p. 18). In what ways does memory operate as a "corrector of existence" in this novel, and in life?

3. Swayze notes, "An observant boy in the small town of that long-ago American era could learn much by just listening and watching, and could privately appropriate merely in the course of events more knowledge of an adult person than that person might have of himself" (p. 33). Whom does Swayze understand better than the person understands him or herself?

4. On some levels, Durley Godbold and Amanda Pettibone seem poorly suited for each other. The town gossips burst with ideas as to why they are together — most hypotheses centering on the Godbold money. Why do you think Amanda marries Durley?

5. Swayze recognizes that in his position of funeral director Potter Ricks has become "a custodian of our past" (p. 121). Are there any other characters who can be similarly described?

6. Swayze asserts that doing something well makes one a hero (p. 290). Who are the heroes in Taps?

7. When Swayze and Arch are first commissioned to play "Taps," they look upon it as a somewhat unwelcome task. By the end of the novel, their playing has clearly taken on a new meaning for them? In what ways does this experience change them? Is it for the better?

8. Fisk's Landing has sent its young men to many a war — the Legionnaires, for the most part, represent veterans of WWI, and the VFW has begun recruiting from the veterans of more recent wars. How does the Korean War affect the town differently from any past war?

9. Willie Morris has often been categorized as a "Southern" writer. Could this story have been set anyplace else?

10. Luke Cartwright is described as "achingly American" (p. 70). What makes him so? What is Willie Morris's definition of "American"?

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"Engaging...endearing..charming and old fashioned...Taps is a good reminder of what we have lost with Willie Morris's passing."

—The Washington Post

"Willie Morris's great novel, his summation...Taps is a triumph throughout with some of his finest prose. From the very first lines, his hard-earned craftsmanship is evident...a work of art, Taps was written to last."

—The Los Angeles Times

"Poignant, funny, heartwarming and suspenseful...a deeply affecting swan song by one of America's most beloved writers."

—Publisher's Weekly

"Pure quadruple-distilled Willie Morris...[and] quite magical... Morris paints a full and vivid and moving picture of what it was like to be sixteen in the Delta in the 1950s."

—Memphis Commercial Appeal