Where Trouble Sleeps
by Clyde Edgerton
List Price: $12.95
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345426320
Publisher: Ballantine Books
For his seventh novel, Clyde returns to the setting of his own childhood, a North Carolina crossroads community at mid twentieth century. With a newly installed blinking red-and-yellow light to accommodate growing traffic, the 1950 Listre crossroads also boasts a grocery store, a service station, a barber shop, a variety store, a grill, some tourist cabins, and a few houses. This is the story of what happens when a stranger passing though decides to spend a few days there.
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1. How would you characterize
Stephen's relationship with each of his parents? With his church and his
religion?
2. What prospects of
stability are offered to the community by the church? Instability?
3. How is the church
important to Jack Umstead?
4. How is the setting
(1950s, rural community) important to the story?
5. What might Alease
see in Jack Umstead and why? Does he have any redeeming qualities? If
so, what are they?
6. Discuss the significance
of the title.
7. How are the major
characters and the community changed by Umstead's visit?
8. How does shifting
point of view aid or hinder your reading of this story?
9. How might a year-2000
visit by Jack Umstead to Listre, North Carolina, be different from the
1952 visit in Where Trouble Sleeps?
10. How were your childhood
views of God and religion different from those of Stephen?
11. How will Stephen's
experiences as a child in Where Trouble Sleeps influence his life
as an adolescent? As an adult? Which of the adults in the novel will he
most resemble as an adult?
12. What events or experiences
in your own childhood could become the basis for a novel?
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"Clyde Edgerton is an American Treasure."
—San Diego Union-Tribune
"What Garrison Keillor has done for Lake Wobegon, Edgerton has done for Listre, creating a place of battered charms and dog-eared lore."
—The Washington Post
"Here, evil comes to sleepy Listre, N.C., circa 1950, in the form of a stranger with a pencil-thin mustache and a trunkful of dirty movies. Listre is the kind of rustic crossroads where the most exciting event in years was a collision between a mule and a pickup truck, where boys slip over to the Gulf station for a Nehi and a peek at the pinup calendar, and where everybody knows everybody else's secrets. It's the kind of place, in other words, where it seems like nothing ever changes--until the fateful day when everything changes at once."
—Entertainment Weekly
"Hilarious...Wonderful...Edgerton engagingly captures small-town America."
—Atlanta Journal & Constitution
