Not Enough Women

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

They are described on the jacket as “ordinary country folk in the backwoods of Missouri,” but this colourful collection of degenerates and misfits issurely anything but ordinary — anywhere. American Gothic at its weirdest, this strange, elliptical tale describes the lifelong mission of self-sacrificing Mrs. Mabel Coker. Sexually abused by her own father in early childhood (in what is apparently the time-honoured way in her peculiar community), Mabel holds masculine sexual ignorance to blame. The careful sexual education of all the local young men, and the exorcism of their carefully-instilled sexual shame, will, she hopes, forestall the likelihood that they in their turn will molest their own helpless offspring. Rabelaisian, with echoes of Faulkner explicit to a degree in language and content, but tortuous in its working-out, this vision of countryfolk at work and play is enough to give a city-dweller second thoughts about that retirement home in the hills.