There was a certain accord between them, right from the beginning. The boy thought the old man looked pretty good for ninety, and the old man thought the boy, whose name was Dale, looked pretty good for thirteen.
The kid started by calling him Great-Grandpa, but Barrett was having none of that. “It makes me feel even older than I am. Call me Rhett. That’s what my father called me. I was a Rhett before there was a Rhett Butler—imagine that.”
Dale asked him who Rhett Butler was.
“Never mind. It was a bad book and only a so-so movie. Tell me again about this project of yours.”
“We’re supposed to talk to our oldest relative, and ask what life was like when he was my age. Then I’m supposed to write a two-page report on how much things have changed. But Mr. Kendall hates generalities, so I’m supposed to concentrate on one or two specifics. That means—”
“I know what specifics are,” Rhett said. “Which specifics have you got in mind?”
In “I Am No One” we find a writer standing on the border between the immediate and the allegorical, the personal and the political, the thriller and the novel of ideas, glancing in several directions at once. It raises the enticing question of where Flanery’s bold imagination will choose to transport us to next.
When Maryellis Bunn was a child, she dreamed of jumping into a swimming pool full of sprinkles. So, here we are.