Understanding Women

Named “best novel” by the Texas Institute of Letters, C.W. Smith’s Understanding Women is the hilarious and moving account of a teenage boy’s encounters in the prickly thicket of adult domestic difficulties. When James (Jimbo) Proctor gets an offer from his Uncle Waylan to spend a summer working in the oil fields as a roustabout to earn the cash for a car, he happily agrees. But when he arrives in the small New Mexico town, he finds that his uncle and aunt are living apart. He and his uncle have to bunk in the back of the uncle’s shop. Jimbo wonders if this is just a little spat or a serious breach (it keeps him from enjoying his aunt’s home cooked meals), and is it related to Uncle Waylan’s recent acquisition of a stunning young secretary named Sharon? Thinking of himself as the protagonist of what he calls The Hardy Boy and the Mystery of the Marital Estrangement, Jimbo sets out to solve the puzzle of what makes people fall in and out of love. The mystery grows exponentially deeper and more personal when Jimbo himself tumbles headlong for Sharon’s cousin, Trudy, a college girl and aspiring writer who teaches him about beatniks and bebop and the manly art of bedding a beloved. “What's inside Jimbo's head makes for compulsive and delicious reading. He watches his uncle and his fellow workers for clues as to what makes a man, and he obsesses, with extraordinary in¬nocence, over all the different women in this story and their relationship to him and to his uncle. Sweat and drink, smoking and cussing, sex talk and sex dreams and sex stories—all that boy stuff is articulated beautifully, as is Jimbo's growing sense of women as actual people….Wonderful reading. “ (Booklist)