IoS paperback review: Edisto, by Padgett Powell

First out in the US in 1984, Padgett Powell’s delightful debut was finally published in the UK this year.

Offbeat, playful and very, very funny, it follows 12-year-old Simons Everson Manigault, a budding author, as he strolls around Edisto, South Carolina, in search of material for his shot at The Great American Novel.

The joke is that Simons is not a particularly promising writer: when we are provided with a snippet of his work it proves to be unreadable doggerel. But Powell’s own prose is wonderfully light and limber, whether he is describing a boxing match – “tiny mortals in a huddle” – or a misty morning on the Atlantic coast – “the ground moon-pocked by the night’s hard rain”.