Richard Grant (Crazy River) is "a misfit Englishman with a U.S. passport and a taste for remote places," a writer and professional peripatetic when he encounters an old plantation home in the Mississippi Delta. Later he will ask, "What sort of idiot goes on a picnic and ends up buying a house?" He then explains.
In Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta, Richard moves, with his girlfriend, from New York City to a spot even the locals find remote. They struggle with home improvements, an enormous vegetable garden and the moral problem they encounter in hunting for their meat. After some hilarious hiccups along the way, they take pleasure in living in large part off the land. Perhaps more challenging are questions of culture: the liberal newcomers are sensitive to their conservative religious neighbors, who are surely suspicious in turn. But from the beginning they manage to bond like family.
Grant narrates the next year with reflection and humor, from electoral politics and absurd local news to learning how to hunt and party like a Deltan. The myriad forms and intensities of racism and racial tension develop into a theme, as Grant pursues diverse friends and acquaintances. But he finds beauty as well as complexity, and concludes, "I had done the thing that modern life conspires against. I had fully inhabited the present without distraction." Dispatches from Pluto offers a lovely, appreciative and entertaining tour of the strange and rich Mississippi Delta. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia