Hume's Fork: A Novel

Description

Barely adequate philosophy professor Legare Hume has a mind-body problem. No matter how far he goes, no matter how hard he thinks, he can't escape the world he lives in. On the run from his wife Tally, Legare joins brilliant but exceptionally awkward colleague Saul Grossman to attend the American Philosophical Association's Charleston, SC conference. Legare's mission is simple enough: put up with the conference, read a paper he never thought anyone would want to hear, receive the tenure he isn't sure he wants, and return, or not, to the wife who nearly killed him before he left. But his plans are hijacked by a botched hotel reservation and the all-too-convenient presence of the Southern family Legare has worked very hard all his adult life to avoid. Circumstances -- namely the inconvenient death of a mentally challenged uncle -- bring the whole family together. Meanwhile, wrestlers in the guise of religious figures enact the Apocalypse. And through it all, there's Lucian, Legare's late brother, who killed himself years ago. What does his death mean? What's the family secret Legare has been hiding from? What's there to learn from this rapid-fire collision of worlds, where all kinds of people and all kinds of views are inherently and bizarrely connected? And what will it take for Legare to be both in and of the world?

?Reading Hume's Fork is like having a conversation with John Kennedy Toole, Pat Conroy, and Noam Chomsky all at once?and what is positively brilliant about Ron Cooper's debut novel is that this works so seamlessly. Cooper's dialogue is comic satire at its finest while striking a chord at the universal themes of life."