Plot
Combining elements of Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner, the story focuses on eighteen-year-old Purslane Hominy Will, who leaves the Florida trailer park where she lives with her abusive boyfriend to return to her hometown of New Orleans following the drug overdose death of her jazz singer mother Lorraine, a free spirit she had not seen for several years. The girl is startled to discover one-time Auburn University professor of literature Bobby Long and his protégé and former teaching assistant, struggling writer Lawson Pines, living in her dilapidated childhood home. Both men are heavy drinkers who spend their days smoking numerous cigarettes, quoting Dylan Thomas, Benjamin Franklin, and T.S. Eliot, playing chess, and spending time with the neighbors while Bobby strums a guitar and sings melancholy country-folk songs. The two convince Pursy her mother left the house to all three of them, although in reality she is the sole heir and the time they legally are allowed to remain in it is limited by the terms of the will.
Pursy moves in and proves to be the most responsible and sensible member of the dysfunctional family the three create. The men's efforts to drive her away gradually abate as they grow fond of her with the passing of time. Bobby - unshaven, slovenly, and suffering from ailments he prefers to ignore - attempts to improve the lot of the young girl by introducing her to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and encouraging her to return to high school and get her diploma. Lawson, suffering from writer's block, finds himself attracted to Pursy but hesitant to complicate his life further by becoming involved with her. Memories of Lorraine linger for all of them, especially Pursy, who vividly recalls her mother ignoring her in favor of pursuing a career. Her sense of who her mother was is altered somewhat when she finds a cache of letters Lorraine wrote her but never mailed, letters that lead her to discover not only how her mother really felt about her, but the true identity of her father as well.
Read more about this topic: A Love Song For Bobby Long
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)