review - the Winged and Garlanded Nike

Review June 2011



The WINGED and GARLANDED NIKE
(A novel of the atomic age)
by S G Scott,
Regent Press,
418 pp., $22 – Amazon Kindle, $9.99

R L Nelson

A publicist for this hybrid novel would likely be challenged to come up with a zinger of a short blurb. He might puzzle over its narrative counterpoint or be uncertain how to convey its intent, and so would resort to broad-brush promotionals like: “Offbeat twists and turns with a touch of whimsey amid the Cold War weapon culture;” or, “Host of colorful characters and their thirty-year relationships carry the day in this engaging saga of the hideous Cold War epoch.” A little hyped, but both do convey something of the core of The Winged and Garlanded Nike. Short touts, though, would fall well short of a meaningful entrée into this insightful and busy work. A novel which embraces aspects of the Cold War, the defense industry, the morbid issue of nuclear weaponry, but avoids the hyperactive constructs and well-worn characters typical in the formulae of the “Techno-Thriller” genre, is out of the ordinary and invites a closer look. Nor will a limited review do either. And even after a more lengthy discussion, a reviewer may come away feeling she’d really like to take another crack at it.

This story takes place during two key years of the Cold War, 1955 and 1986. The rambling 1955 part teases at the main themes of the novel but provides the staging and background for their dénouements in the second part. Along the way Nike, with sly humor and backlit with flashes of irony, manages to skewer the logic of several Department of Defense real missile programs, Scientology, professorship, President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, sports’ mania, nuclear deterrence, and it even toys with the tortuous machinations of sex and romance. However, these are second order matters to the book’s overriding and not-so-subtle theme espoused by Associate Professor Richard Hervey after a couple of martinis: ‘Uranium – Nature’s unforgiving and unforgivable mistake.’
The Winged and Garlanded Nike has its ‘techno’side, in that it deals accurately with certain real and deadly issues involving Cold War weaponry. But it’s a ‘salad of genres’ (thanks here to Nabokov and Humbert’s genetic makeup) mixed up and dealt chapter by chapter: Murder mystery? Yes, albeit decades in the past; a slanted view into the Military-Industrial Complex; out-of-kilter romance, requited and not quite so; a strong environmental cry symbolically represented by a four-thousand-year old pine tree and an extinct salamander; documented fragments of two significant years of the Cold War; and a thirty-year gambling fiasco. The novel is character-rich, including those outlandish, nicknamed ones in minor roles: Extra-Virgin Virginia, Heat Wave, the company mail girl, Alex Plutonium, Breeder Mannoy, THE Bernadette, and Meriweather, the cockatiel that won’t die.
I’ll term as sentimental realism the feel of story and character in Nike – slightly cockeyed, but realism most certainly. Its narratives portray a convincing historical backdrop as well as a muted sense of horror about the ominous presence of those maximum nuclear weapons – and does so by not pandering with violent, crowd-pleasing scenarios. The novel’s approach to the arcane nuclear weapon world is skewed, easy to take, yet it projects a hard, underlying edginess illustrated by one character’s pithy observation in 1986: ‘You couldn’t deny technological revolution and evolution, but when you had the ultimate explosion, a megaton, packaged in something your arms could surround, maybe all this tinkering with it and the rest of the hardware over the thirty years amounts to little more than technological busy-work – simply a gilding of the bombs and their delivery means.’ This might suggest a gloomy reading experience, but that’s not the case at all. This Nike saga has other entwined and ingratiating stories to tell.
In the early 1950’s, when confrontation with the Soviets was heating up, the Department of Defense (DoD) issued procurement instructions favoring those competing defense companies which dispersed some of their operations from regions of concentrated industry near the coasts. It was a time of great anxiety as America became vulnerable to Soviet developments in strategic weaponry, notably their long range “Bison” bomber, carrying the new H-bomb. With the implementation of ‘Industrial Dispersal,’ more parts of the country then began to receive the largesse emanating from DoD.

Just how entrenched and political have variations of this procurement policy become is illustrated by the recent bloody battle over the proposal to cut back on F-22 fighter production. It turned out that most of the fifty states had some sort of contractual stake in its production, thus making any such cuts politically difficult. In S G Scott’s novel, a minor character, economist Dr. Norris Deepak, makes the pragmatic and cynical argument in 1955 that selling the growing Pentagon budget in Congress would be politically impossible if year after year contracts were funneled into a handful of geographic locations. “ - - but contract the money around the country, into the likes of Utah and Mississippi, and then the DoD budget becomes a politically locked-in entitlement program, its monetary stimulus not unlike that of Social Security.”
In the novel, Maxtar Missile Systems Division, builder of the realistic SPICA strategic missile, is transplanted from Los Angeles to the invented town of Fernville in the heart of California’s old Gold Rush region. (Its prosaic name was established in 1888 as a bitter civic compromise between the original and ugly Kloitsville and the lovely Robles Grande {Great Oaks}). There, the novel’s wicked, witty but documentary peek into the secret defense establishment in the fifties introduces the first of its several telling metaphors: Gold and Uranium – equal in Weight and maybe in Consequence. (Densities of the two elements differ by less than five percent – close enough here for metaphorical merit). Gold signifies greed over a metal with a quite limited utility, and, by inference, humankind’s heavy hand in worldwide environmental devastation; and uranium symbolizes the hideous possibility we don’t talk or think about much these days. The currant nuclear weapon status quo, however, was rudely brought to light recently when it was reported that fifty of our Minuteman III strategic missiles were “knocked off line” by equipment failure. Yes, twenty years after the end of the Cold War we’re still pointing several thousand nuclear warheads at Russian (and other?) targets – likewise, theirs at us.
The nuclear and environmental themes are the novel’s didactic bottom lines, hinted, sometimes hammered at, but fortunately tempered by other engaging narratives. The absurdity of the nuclear confrontation is strikingly illustrated by a scene in a lunatic’s bomb shelter and also during a routine scientific conference. These situations are bizarre, but also moving and funny through their indirect but cogent insights.

Risk and chance weigh in too as metaphor. The novel’s protagonist, Dick Hervey, middle-aged, acerbic and on the academic career skids, hauntingly sums up the inane culture of nuclear weaponry: That given enough time and societal inattention to those remaining arsenals of a nuclear Armageddon, “Probability will eventually speak.” He views uranium with its “bad seed,” the fissionable U235, as the “mother of it all,” and aptly says of the weapon buildup in the fifties decade: “It was like an intractable and fast-dividing bacterium, already beyond human will or ability to control.” The novel doesn’t speculate over possible nuclear tipping points, but Nike’s pertinence about this issue might cause a few of us to imagine the awful – if “uranium” ever became the ultimate option of a nation’s hot-headed military cabal during a grave international crisis. Pakistan, India and the Koreas should come to mind.
Professor Hervey’s meager published work include Politics Around the Atom (Failure by Personality) and Hiroshima (Revising History), and are suggestive of his political lean. Both are discredited and little read, as a conservative, post-McCarthy climate prevailed in 1955 California. Professor John Wickware, whose scholarship is herpetology, is a professor ‘character,’ perhaps on the stereotypical side. (depressed, alcoholic, loner, specialist in recondite animals like newts). He antagonizes and embarrasses the college administration by espousing extreme anthropomorphic views. Dick Hervey jokes at him, “- - the jealous frog - - the salamander’s sense of humor?”
Wickware’s worry over environmental doom extends to despair over humankind’s fooling around with the atom. During a discussion about the “nuclear stranger,” and stimulated by the “evocative lubricant of Hervey’s bourbon,” the professor offers this trenchant but mordant observation: “Isn’t it ironic that the physicists’ wonderful nuclear word, ‘fission’, was stolen right out of cell biology … the multiplication of life. And now the term suggests a means for eliminating it.” In a discussion about the flawed logic behind the huge weapon buildups, Wickware abruptly interjects a conversation-stopper with, “I’ve enough survival problems with newts and the like. Yours looks to be hopeless.” It’s not surprising that thirty years later, with wife gone (“THE Bernadette”) and career over, we find Wickware, in Hervey’s words, “holed up, drinking, and listening to Bartok.”
Wickware once took Hervey and his young daughter on a biological field trip. For Clarissa the only non-boring part of the trip was reading Burma Shave signs along the highway. They venture to California’s remote bristlecone pine forest, the oldest living things on earth and another symbol in this metaphorically-rich allegory. With help from a little brandy, Wickware and Hervey ponder whether these same trees, already four-thousand years old, might outlive the human race, now recklessly pursuing out-sized nuclear weaponry. The author’s touch is oblique, skeptical and often funny, whether addressing thirty-year affairs of the heart, environmental degradation, nukes, or a zany gambling adventure.
Fernville is the fulcrum of Nike with its underpinnings from the state’s Gold Rush times a hundred years earlier. The gold rush in the Sierra Nevada foothills was the most powerful transformative force ever for California. Similar to its dynamics were the demographic, environmental and financial impacts from the hundreds of billions of dollars – if not trillions – that the Department of Defense pumped into California through defense contracts for over thirty years of the Cold War. The gold rush era was a frenzy in the extraction of California’s riches. The “missile rush” was the opposite – for a tidal wave of fortune poured into the state. Fernville’s roots are in the nineteenth-century gold rush, but its twentieth-century sustenance is the “missile rush.” And when Maxtar’s large DoD contract is cancelled, the region faces economic disaster. As simply a droll story of life in a small town in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills, this novel, if comprised only its drawn-out murder mystery, the Fernville characters, and several poignant romantic entanglements, would warrant a passing grade as a slight genre novel.
Nike’s cast of ten or so major characters are introduced in 1955 when, after a drunken party, they witness an atmospheric nuclear bomb test conducted at dawn at the Nevada Test Site 200 miles away, its flash and aurora easily seen over the mountains from Fernville. Their lives’ orbits crossed then, “a kind of nodal point,” as they would again thirty years later at another. This nuclear “hook” is introduced again in a flashback when, as soldiers, Hervey and future nephew and aspiring nuclear physicist, Howie Stadler, witness the first atomic test in New Mexico in 1945. Hervey saw the uncanny flash as a “three-second persuasion” that taught him everything about the nuclear stranger. But upon further thought, he realized that – ‘no, it was not even three seconds, but was no longer than the instantaneous flash of that first atomic fire.’ For Stadler, next to him in the bunkered trench, ‘the brightness went to his intellectual heart and he saw, not terror and annihilation, but an exciting future romancing the atom.’
The author veers close to parody in several of the narratives which carry over from 1955 to their tidy conclusions in1986. A ruinous betting scam at Maxtar - that ‘solved’ thirty-five year old murder - a surreal college football game played during a hundred-year rainstorm - ‘Probability’ subverted by a roulette wheel - and other zany doings – all would seem to cloud the reality lens that the bulk of the novel urges us to look through. Such constructs, which early on might seem to be grafted-on extraneous plots or textual paddings, are not. If we hold on, they are eventually seen as realities at the margin, and as the various plots work their way toward the novel’s end, they nicely fit into the author’s master puzzle like those few remaining pieces in a jigsaw that suddenly and surprisingly complete the whole. Several matters, however, will remain as loose ends; one involves the vagaries of sex and romance, tentative and insecure anyway; and “Uranium,” Hervey’s deep-seated symbol of the world of nuclear weaponry, hangs yet as the nuclear sword of Damocles.
Alice Smith, spirited, alcoholic, erratic, and the wife of the CEO of Maxtar, is one character of whom the reader might readily think: “Yes, I know a person like that,” suggesting someone flamboyant or unique. Stereotypes? Fictional beings can’t avoid being pigeon-holed to some degree by the reader. Perhaps the author deliberately defuses the matter early on by having Alice Smith, neophyte author who uses Fernville and its denizens in her first murder mystery, declare about the matter: “You, Hervey, and Wickware too, and even Fernville itself – you’re all stereotypes. That’s what I must overcome.” Refreshingly, few psychological issues or the details of messy interpersonal relationships burden the pages, even though we know they are being experienced. The author deliberately underdetermines character, and whatever interiority the reader reads into the characters comes mostly through the suggestive natures of dialogue and plot.
And so we ride the surfaces of the characters. But we can feel the pain, really feel it, when young, unworldly, and introverted missile engineer, Arthur Sonett, is dumped by his nubile girlfriend, Clarissa Hervey, a clerk at the company, and described by a co-worker as, “nice legs, tits - - and not bad in the face,” 1955 guy talk, to be sure. Sonett’s emotional disaster is especially poignant considering that he was that close to his first sexual experience and to delivering a subsequent marriage proposal, but instead ended up around a group campfire ‘- - with aching balls, mouthing words to old songs – funny how Clarissa didn’t seem to mind at all.’ And we are led to feel that more is yet to come from this callow couple. Such a back-story turns out to be pertinent to the thrust of the novel, as Nike juggles and juxtaposes narrative threads, from the deadly serious to the not-so ridiculous.
One of the postwar’s earliest defensive missiles was the Army’s Nike Ajax, developed in the forties and early fifties. Its publicity material featured the figure of the winged and garlanded Nike, Greek Goddess of Victory, underscored with the puzzling slogan, “She not only thinks but She dreams.” That is the source of the novel’s expressive title and cover art. The Nike missile becomes a symbol in both parts of the novel for thirty years of futility, waste and hubris in the realm of defensive missile weaponry during the height of the Cold War. It was the precursor for a series of flawed defensive missiles and programs that extended into the seventies (Nike Hercules, Nike X, Sentinel, Safeguard, Nike Zeus, and the Sprint and Spartan missiles, the latter tipped with a 5 megaton nuclear payload!!) It took over two decades to kill Nike Ajax and its nuclear-tipped descendants, all finally recognized as ineffective against the perceived threat of thousands of modern Soviet missiles. But their rationale, though hopelessly flawed, never quite received a political stake through the heart. It was resurrected in the eighties by President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed “Star Wars,” a derogatory tag appropriate for the proposed costly, vast, and unworkable scheme. Throughout this period the U.S. and the Soviets played an escalating nuclear weapon chess game which became more and more arcane as thousands of missiles with nuclear warheads were placed on alert. “- - - Nuclear Strategy had become the stuff of a living dream world,” an apt quote in the novel’s introduction from Fred Kaplan’s Wizards of Armageddon.
Nike addresses this nuclear posturing in a dramatic and realistic episode, by drawing on an actual agenda of a conference of nuclear and atmospheric scientists in1986 about the possible effects of a ‘Nuclear Winter.’ It is a far more chilling episode than one might experience from that in a genre novel because it highlights a numbing disconnect between the depicted horrors of all-out nuclear war and the utterly detached and banal demeanor of the scientists who deliver presentations about it. (“They were just coming up with the numbers,” one says in explanation). Again, an offbeat, dramatic and humorous event occurs, an excoriating intrusion into the assembly that rescues us from more nuclear messaging and leaves the scientists short the light pointer, the slide machine, the microphone, and the podium itself, without which “they were just helpless up there.”
A Nike missile ends up on a remote hill above Fernville in a proud missile display, a real and also a symbolic icon, and where the two star-crossed lovers, Arthur Sonett and Clarissa Hervey, reunite after thirty years. Sonett, drawn more strongly to the moonlit missile than to the woman next to him, sees the Nike not only for its failure of purpose but also as a representation of his long, misguided career in the weapon culture of the Cold War. Now, he thinks, ‘Boy Scouts and casual visitors look with some awe at the Nike relic, few realizing its concept was rendered obsolete even as it was being developed.’
But that’s not the last of that missile in these pages. At the very end Dick Hervey sees it in the reflected setting sun, and thinks that the ‘likes of Nike must no longer be worshipped as monuments, but rather consigned without sentiment to the large scrap heap of military folly and hubris – and then he would see Goddess Nike where she belonged – in a museum – and winged and garlanded as before.’ A fitting end, indeed, for this didactic adventure, and a frustrated cry at our nuclear weapon world of today.
We’ve bypassed here most of the secondary narratives which offer supporting roles for, and also leaven, the main themes, and in themselves are often poignant and entertaining in their originality. Some readers might catch allusions to eighteenth century English literature, specifically to Samuel Richardson’s novel, Clarissa. Not only does the author lift names from that novel (‘My uncle Hervey’ and ‘Clarissa’) but he also makes use of Richardson’s epistolary technique in the Intermezzo section of the novel where Hervey and Alice communicate by short letters or notes over thirty years that keep us appraised of Fernville’s physical change (and by projection also California’s) and its characters’ lives. And finally, an elderly Dick Hervey, exhausted by his Sisyphean battle with the nuclear genie, wonders if he might instead return to his literary roots and write a revision to the classic Clarissa tragedy that would see a happy ending rather than her sad and untimely death. He smiles at the prospect of the tailing off of his academic scholarship … ‘from Hiroshima, Revisited to Clarissa, revised.’
Toward the end of the 1955 part, Hervey and Alice attend an opera, Die Frau ohne Schotten (The Woman without a Shadow) where he struggles with the realization that the shooting star of an affair with Alice has burned out and soon she would be ‘a shadow without a woman – a long and lingering one.’ They meet later in a final tryst in “romantic” Bakersfield, California. The author slyly tells us little of this encounter, only that it began with celebratory double martinis, and implying later that they ceased writing to each other for two years! Knowing the volatile nature of these two, we can readily imagine that a ferocious lover’s quarrel ensued, perhaps with objects hurled. The author’s hands-off here follows Alice’stricture on sex and mayhem in her mystery novels: “- - behind closed doors – trusting them to the readers’ fertile imagination over the writer’s graphic effusions,” a disappointment for some readers, but fresh air, certainly, for many others.
During that opera Hervey, in his cramped seat, works over the other matter weighing on his mind, the lecture he would deliver the next day about the uranium extravaganza. His key point, he at once realizes, will be: that the exculpable credo expressed by several of the early atomic scientists – “Atomic weapons were not only weapons of terrible destruction but, more than that, they were also SUPER PHYSICS!” – was the tap root of the nuclear blunder!
Nike may prove troublesome as a dilatory read. Rather, it wants the reader to get into and stay with it. The laying of the groundwork for of its several plots and number of characters could frustrate the impatient reader who’s conditioned for the immediate hook and action. And a reader who dabbles over it will likely remain off balance, if indeed she finishes it at all. When the characters are in place to the patient reader, though, the novel turns into a bit of a romp. If the technical diversions or 1955 political matters begin to burden, Nike shifts gears, for example, to a wild Halloween party where croaking bullfrogs and shrieks of Howler monkeys blast out over an early “hi fi” system; or to a Las Vegas casino where a fortune is lost just as the casino shakes from the nuclear blast waves from the nearby Nevada Test Site (‘coursing over the desert like invisible tsunami waves’); or even to a bawdy scene in a seedy bordello across the border.
The difficult issues addressed in Nike remain unresolved. Those relationships doomed to fail by definition, do. The romance of Hervey and Alice was always so destined through the practical and insurmountable differences of temperament, age and status. Arthur Sonett, a late-comer to maturity, sees Clarissa at forty-nine through separate and conflicting lenses – the one of riveting erotic memories from his hot-blooded youth thirty years before, and the other from his cooled-down age of fifty-seven as he’s confronted with her array of cats and the library of New Age Self Help he spots from her bed. We don’t know, and neither does he yet, how compelling is his observation that her naked body, now before him, compares favorably with the nineteen-year-old-one of thirty-years before, which then he could only imagine a hundred times over. Will he return to Fernville – to Clarissa? The bets are on: Dave Cornwell, the master gambler, gives fifty-fifty he won’t, while Hervey, bitterly claiming he’s the “authority on love,” bets two to one he will.
Uncertainty, again, applies to the ongoing murder, a lightweight variation of the common and resolving genre, that pops up at random. It serves as a means to explore Fernville’s earlier times and to keep several colorful characters in view. The “solution” can tease readers who expect an unequivocal result. It’s solved! – but then – maybe it isn’t. And if other possible truths exist, then the received characterization of the villain or villains has been all wrong.
But it’s the “uranium matter,” the crux of the novel, which remains as intractable, unresolved, and threatening as it has been since 1945. As the media today serves up more celebrity, sex and sports, the public seems to grow more indifferent to the grave issues involved. The Winged and Garlanded Nike, in its long, crooked, and quirky path into the heart of the nuclear genie, might sway or even frighten a few of that indifferent public to the lurking disaster still with us after over a half century of hiding from them in plain view.
At the end of the novel in 1986, Dick Hervey, observes the old Nike Ajax missile on the distant hill, still revered by some, but which he sees as a relic from the time the hand of uranium rendered it and other such exotic defensive weapon concepts obsolete. Hervey carries that thought further, and in a burst of optimism over the issue of the millennium, he thinks: ‘Surely, by the 21st century, even the most myopic of humans will have finally comprehended the overriding peril threatened by uranium and its offspring – and will then have them under a tight and controlling leash.’
The novel, however, does not end on Dick Hervey’s sanguine expectation of a coming nuclear sanity. Instead, the author subverts the old curmudgeon’s exhausting, half century struggle with the nuclear genie, pulls the rug out and has the last word – authors’ prerogative, we guess. In a non-fiction Epilogue, terse and real headlines from newspapers and pertinent quotes since the turn of the 21st century are simply listed. And there is little reason for optimism seen there. The litany of scary quotes, specific to worsening nuclear matters, builds up to the last two; the pessimistic advance of the minute hand on the Doomsday Clock’s from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – and last, a quote from the late Philip Berrigan, former priest and anti-nuclear activist, that goes directly to the agonizing heart of the matter:

“I die with the conviction held since 1968 … that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family and the Earth itself.”

It is a perfect exclamation point to The Winged and Garlanded Nike.



A note from the reviewer

Enclosed are my comments about the novel, The Winged and Garlanded Nike (A novel of the atomic age) by S G. Scott. To my knowledge, no one has written a novel about the profound impact on the environment, the demographics and at the human level owing to the defense industry's buildup and its influence over forty years of the Cold War. These dynamics were especially pronounced in California, the setting for this novel. As a longtime technical writer and editor in that business, I was intrigued by this one-of-a kind novel which, on the one hand, so graphically brought to life those distant years of mine spent in the secret bowels of the missile industry. But the novel, I soon found, encompassed much more than simply an entertaining if offbeat telling of the then life and times. With its many facets and broad scope, it is indeed a novel with much to say, and one with appeal across a broad reader spectrum. My comments about Nike became long because anything less would short-change the feel of the novel’s essence, which speaks through its multiplots, its ingratiating characters and its two overriding themes: those of the nuclear genie let loose and our myopic mistreatment of the earth’s sensitive environment.
S G Scott and I both spent many years in the defense/missile industry and are longtime friends. We both chose to quit that secret and hubristic world for reasons that the novel well illustrates – I, to develop educational products, and Scott to a career at N.A.S.A. and authorship. I have tried to stand aside from our relationship in commenting on this novel which, in addition to its entertaining novelistic features, has great relevance to today’s unstable world.
I may be contacted at patnelson@sbcglobal.net


Robert L Nelson

Pertinence and the Nuclear Option

Here "nuclear option" means just what it did for fifty years or so. That is, the HIDEOUS option, not the metaphoric and eviscerated meaning when the term is applied today to political actions. A possible new START treaty with Russia, with more reductions in warheads and delivery vehicles, would seem to make "Nike," my alarmist novel about the nuclear threat in the 1950's and 80's, not so pertinent anymore. But not so fast. When worldwide nuke arsenals drop to a level of a two digit number, a long, long way to go from the thousands still more or less on alert, the novel may then be deemed "historical." In the long meantime "Nike" should continue to strike fear and anger in the perceptive reader - that wise men of those past decades enabled deployment of nuclear warheads in their obscene thousands.

Those readers who don't wish to dwell on that "option" are welcome to ride the novel's rollercoaster of sentiment, wit and romance instead, and try to figure out the murder.

Genre?

Genre?
Calling a novel "non-genre" these days, in the crowded universe of genre fiction, might suggest to some that the novel floats in a kind of limbo, flirting with classification, and perhaps in want of a narrowing to a well-defined category for easy access by the readership. Like many novels, though, "The Winged and Garlanded Nike" comprises a soup of so-called genres, and that amorphous mix permits the author to apply the "literary" label, whether deserved or not of the lofty company that the term should connote. The reader, depending what she herself brings to it, may see "Nike" as an historical Saga across the Cold War nuclear confrontations, a metaphoric tale of gold and uranium, murder mystery, Romance, or simply as broadly sentimental and witty narratives overlaid by a hideous pall of our nuclear madness – all with a cast of original characters. Take your pick - if you must.

Website for the novel, "The Winged and Garlanded Nike"

The novel's upgraded website is http://www.wingednike.com/ It now contains the prologue and the first seven chapters - the narrative thread there stopping just short of the improbable and first erotic encounter between Richard Hervey and Alice Smith on the Smith starlit patio which overlooks the town of Fernville. And after reading those seven chapters, the reader will find all the characters in place and accounted for, the locales described, the principle narratives in this saga established, and clues to the main themes suggested.
The website provides a long description of the novel with thumbnail sketches of the characters, and includes reviews and several blurbs by well known or else professional people as well as a section with comments by a number of readers. We think this material on the website, if considered, can be persuasive to potential readers.

Now available:

My novel, The Winged and Garlanded Nike, is now available on Amazon, through all bookstores, and directly from the publisher, www.regentpress.net.