Laird Hunt

You wouldn’t expect a United Nations press officer to write a book about an aging Faulknerian simpleton on a rural farm. But that’s what we have in Laird Hunt’s second novel, Indiana, Indiana, just out from local publisher Coffee House Press. Hunt’s hero is a Hoosier State farmer named Noah Summers, somewhat bitter and uncomfortable in his 77-year-old skin and struggling to come to terms with his family history—which includes a lifelong series of psychic flashes and a house fire that killed his parents and threw his wife on the harsh mercy of electroshock-era mental hospitals. The stream-of-consciousness prose style and Southern Gothic plot are quite consciously indebted to works like The Sound and the Fury, but if this is Yoknapatawpha County pastiche, it’s certainly well done. Noah himself sums up the book’s appeal well during a conversation with an itinerant saw player who tells him, after some cajoling, how he lost a finger. “My daddy would like that story. He likes stories that don’t make regular sense,” says Noah. “Well then,” says the saw player, “I reckon he likes most stories.” Ruminator Books, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, www.ruminator.com