Calista's Chicken Fried Chicken

Calista's latest effort, Chicken Fried Chicken, is an exercise in Southern Gothic excess. The protagonist, Johnson Wilson, is nearing the end of a long and mostly happy career teaching linguistics at Cornell. But while he is revered as a spellbinding lecturer, all of his research projects have been small-bore and, at best, workmanlike. He longs to complete a magisterial work befitting his long career.

Meanwhile, Wilson needs money. An acrimonious divorce has left him with only a 1992 Camry and a small and perpetually under-heated house near campus. Early in the book he learns that a friend has received a 6-figure advance to write a popular book on cosmology, and Wilson's envy is palpable.

Wilson is therefore ecstatic when his literary agent, Alain de la Droite, tells him that his book proposal has been accepted by a major publishing house. The advance is generous and the publisher's timeline will allow him to leave Ithaca for two winters in a row to work on The Patois of Southern Louisiana. Wilson practically floats to his daughter's wedding in Brooklyn, where he impulsively foots the bill for a raucous after-party. The next day, after a pleasant brunch with the newlyweds, he heads to Manhattan to sign his book contract.

But when Wilson is ushered into a glassy conference room to complete the formalities, he is in for a surprise. A large cardboard mock-up of his book cover sits on an easel at the end of a table, and de la Droite is waiting for him, grinning ear to ear. But the title on the book is subtly, devastatingly wrong: The Patios of Southern Louisiana. Wilson's mind races. He wants to write a book on linguistics. But he really needs the advance! But surely this is just a misunderstanding? But what if it isn't! Wilson doesn't know anything about patios.

And so it is that after a crash course from a friend in the architecture department, Wilson points his Camry south and into the unknown. The second half of the book follows Wilson as he gamely rings doorbells all across the bayou, brandishing a camera that he barely knows how to use, trying to cobble together enough material for a book that meets his contractual obligations. Wilson is in for more than his share of humiliation, but he also finds hospitality, graciousness, and eventually friendship on his odyssey.

Calista wisely leaves certain questions unanswered. We never learn if Wilson summons the courage to turn in a manuscript on linguistics instead of the book on patios that he has been assembling. We never learn if his marriage proposal, to a federal public defender in New Orleans who rescues him from an alligator while his car is stalled on the shoulder of a rain-drenched highway, is accepted. But what is clear is that, throughout his misadventures, Wilson feels more alive than he has in years, finding some inner source of vigor he didn't know he possessed. And so perhaps de la Droite's typo saved his life. At the very least, it launched a rollicking shaggy dog story that readers will have a hard time putting down.