Goings-On at Eagle Lake 
Christopher Tayler
- Yonder Stands Your Orphan by Barry Hannah
Peden, the junkman, is a Baptist lay preacher who plays the electric violin too loud. He lives in a shotgun house at his junkyard, somewhere not far from Eagle Lake, near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Cars and religion are his obsessions, cars being to him ‘like whiskey to an Indian’, although he’s not a teetotaller either. Peden drives a Comet, ‘a thing out of the age of Sputnik’:
When he was drunk and driving it, he imagined he was riding a hydrogen bomb to Los Angeles. But when Peden was sober, he was apt to wonder if there was a god, or not simply a divine wind of oratory investing man, and this divine wind was blind and deaf and cared not in whom or at what time it manifested itself.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
From the LRB letters page: [ 14 January 2002 ] Max Crawford.
Other articles by this contributor:
Genderbait for the Nerds · William Gibson
A Bit of a Lush · William Boyd
But Little Bequalmed · Louis de Bernières’s Decency
Belgravia Cockney · being a le Carré bore
High on His Own Supply · Amis Recycled
print layout
tell a friend