“The Bible Salesman” (Little, Brown and Company, 256 pages, $23.99), by Clyde Edgerton
Henry Dampier, 20 years old and raised to be a Christian gentleman, is pursuing a career selling Bibles door-to-door when he sticks his thumb out for a ride and ends up traveling an unexpected path.
Dampier is picked up by Preston Clearwater, who turned to a life of crime while in the Army during World War II, and is still pursuing it in the South. The innocent young man is just what Clearwater is looking for: someone bright enough to handle responsibility but naive enough to believe in him almost as ardently as he believes in his faith. Clearwater convinces him that he is an undercover FBI agent.
But Dampier is beginning to question his faith, or at least the Bible writings on which it is based. Reading the Bible for the first time on his own, Dampier discovers discrepancies in its descriptions of the same events. He also discovers different versions of the Bible. Eventually, his belief that Clearwater works for the FBI and that Dampier has a future as an agent also wavers. He realizes the big money he’s earning to drive cars for the agency is also questionable.
Although he does not mind acquiring Bible sales through shady dealings, Dampier definitely draws the line at the kind of crime in which he thinks Clearwater is involved. To get out of the relationship in one piece is not easy.
The book moves back and forth between Dampier’s childhood and his adventures with Clearwater, from his hilarious attempt with his cousin to learn a one-hand technique for unfastening a bra to his first love.
Author Clyde Edgerton grew up in rural North Carolina in the 1940s and 1950s and has a good ear for regional dialect, and a good eye for the details of that era.
Reading his books is much the same as that Southern experience of sitting in front of a fireplace or on a porch and listening to older relatives tell tales. “The Bible Salesman” combines the sweet and funny stories of growing up in the South with the humorous and frightening adventures of a life of crime.
Five of Edgerton’s novels have been New York Times Notables. He is a professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
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