Butterfly Weed: A Novel

Butterfly Weed: A Novel

From BooklistWhile gathering backwoods lore during the 1920s, Vance Randolph (a folklore collector) contracts typhoid fever and comes under the care of Doc Swain. From his nursing home bed, Vance narrates the history of Colvin Swain, who was conceived in a patch of butterfly weed, sliced from his mother's womb, and given to a cave-dwelling folk doctor, who taught Colvin everything he knows about treating the sick in the Ozarks. Doc Swain settles in Stay More, Arkansas, and practices medicine by mixing folk remedies in with scientific procedures. At one point he is healing patients in their dreams, but the dream cures nearly bankrupt him because sleeping patients don't have to pay. At another point Swain is teaching hygiene, psychology, and basketball at a Baptist academy. Here he meets the lusty Venda Breedlove, her son Russ, and the love of his life, Tenny Tennison. One dose of Stay More may not be enough--for a full prescription, readers should check the catalog for other novels by Harington. Jennifer HendersonThe raucous story of Doc Swain describes how he becomes a physician without attending medical school, his ability to heal patients with the "dream cure," his pursuit by a student and a music teacher from the high school at which he teaches, and the heartbreaking choices he must makeFrom Publishers WeeklyNovelist Harington (Ekaterina) continues to revel in the foibles of the residents of Stay More, Ark., focusing this time on the Ozark hamlet's physician, Doc Swain. How Doc became a doctor, learning the deepest secrets of healing from the sweet and crusty Kie Raney, makes up the first part of the book. But Doc has learned his lessons so well and is so successful in his chosen profession that he discovers he is able to treat patients through their dreams. While the novelty of this treatment wins him many customers, the dream cures don't earn him much money. Doc is forced to teach high-school hygiene class, where he falls in love with a student and through witchcraft is turned (briefly) into the sex slave of the music teacher. But he is a hardy sort, not unlike the butterfly weed of the title, a root able to survive the worst either caterpillars or weather can dish out. Harington's rich and original language gives his characters depth and charm as well as puts a new spin on commonplace notions ("Bones is all we got to protect us from gettin squoze and scrunched by the cruel, mean world," remarks Doc's young love in health class) Naughty, tender and unpredictable, Butterfly Weed is a lively trip along a river of language.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.From Kirkus ReviewsInspired, playful storytelling from one of our most consistently original (and impish) novelists (Ekaterina, 1993, etc.), who now returns to his Ozark version of Shangri-la--the village of Stay More, a place hard to find but infinitely harder to leave. Harington's series of novels about this fictional Arkansas community (The Choiring of the Trees, 1991, etc.) and its eccentric population (``Stay Morons'') has been distinguished by an idiosyncratic blend of lovingly rendered detail (on the language, beliefs, and history of southern mountain life) and wild fantasy. This latest installment, a history of the complex love life and remarkable medical achievements of Doc Colvin Swain, Stay More's ``dreaming Doctor,'' is no different: The title derives from an incident in which a chaste young woman, fleeing an unwanted suitor, is rumored to have turned herself into a butterfly, or a flower, to escape. While the bawdy record of Swain's affairs is at the heart of Harington's crowded, exuberant story, we also get a robust portrait of the doctor's special gifts, his patients, and his times (from the end of the 19th century to the 1950s). Apprenticed as a young boy to a hill doctor, he learns to use both a wide range of herbal remedies and conventional cures. But what really sets him apart is his trancelike ability to vis