Hologram

by Padgett Powell

A housewife revels in the secret world of her mind filled with historical characters and twisted love stories in this inventive sendup of Southern fiction. Mrs. Hollingsworth sits at her kitchen table, compiling her grocery list. The subject of the list is not foodstuffs, but memories that never happened, inventions of loves, and strange conspiracies peopled by men who appear in the lonely housewife’s head—men infinitely more real to her than her own husband. Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest gallops into her story, courtesy of media giant Ted Turner and two shady criminal types named Bundy and Oswald who are engaged in a secret experiment to create “the New Southerner.” Her prying daughters believe Mrs. Hollingsworth is losing her mind. But in truth, their mother is simply looking for love via hand-to-hand combat on the surreal battlefield inside her head. Originally published as Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men, Padgett Powell’s Hologram is a stunning literary achievement. Strikingly unique, it is a poignant, funny, and unconventional fever dream brought to lyrical life.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Southern, Novels

161 pages, ebook

First published November 20, 2000

About the author

Padgett Powell is the author of four novels, including Edisto, which was nominated for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Esquire, and other publications, as well as in the anthologies Best American Short Stories and Best American Sports Writing. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches writing at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida.

Reviews

[Bob Wake]

[Reviewed in 2001]

How many struggling writers wouldn’t give their eyeteeth to be in Padgett Powell’s predicament? Since the publication of Edisto, his highly praised 1984 debut novel about a young boy’s eccentric upbringing in the Deep South, Powell has been in lonely competition with himself to fulfill the promise of his first book’s success. Unfortunately, subsequent short story collections and novels (including an oddly muted sequel, Edisto Revisited, in 1996) have failed to build the reputation and readership that were once predicted for this enormously gifted writer. His latest novel, Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men, is such a radical departure in style from his previous work that one is hard-pressed to ascertain whether it represents a bold new direction for the author or a nose-thumbing retreat into experimental obscurantism. Whatever its intent, the book is unlikely to garner Powell new readers or bring much satisfaction to his admirers.

Clocking in at a meager 134 pages (with an inordinate amount of white space), Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men is divided into dozens of brief vignette-like chapters, many of them less than a page or two in length. The story line is comprised of an allegorical reverie unfolding in the imagination of Mrs. Hollingsworth, a fiftyish suburban mother and wife, as she sits at the kitchen table writing her weekly shopping list. Before long, the images in her head and on the page begin taking on an independent life that both delights and disturbs her. As a kind of paradigm for the art of fiction writing—weaving form and structure out of desire and transgression—Mrs. Hollingsworth’s adventures in storytelling seem in part a celebration of the myth-making capacity latent within each of us. It’s a serviceable theme for a short novel, but Powell works too hard at fashioning a collective unconscious for his daydreaming protagonist. The disjointed narrative touches on weighty cultural themes without illuminating them in any significant manner.

Onto the stage of Mrs. Hollingsworth’s increasingly surreal fantasies step the characters of Ted Bundy and Lee Harvey Oswald like trash-talking cousins to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The two killers are employed by a zany media tycoon named Roopit Mogul, whose goal is to locate a citizen who best embodies the ideal of the “New Southerner.” To this end, Bundy and Oswald descend upon the populace with a futuristic “gizmo” that projects life-size holograms of Civil War general Nathan Bedford Forrest. Not everyone can “see” the hologram, however. As Roopit Mogul explains:

My people in science tell me the emotionally disturbed man may prove most sensitive to this kind of image, but I do not want an unstable candidate. The successful candidate will serve as a prototype man for the New Southerner, a man, if I may say so, much like me, whom I will then have eugenically engineered to found a line of men in the New South who will perforce raise up the Old by eliminating the genetic dearth effected by the War…

The search entails a postmodern grab bag of vaudeville slapstick, ribaldry, and social satire (frozen foods and National Public Radio are typical targets of the book’s sarcasm and scorn). At one point, Lee Harvey Oswald is overcome with lascivious desire and crumbles to the ground in masturbatory ecstasy. During a dinner party, Roopit Mogul offers a disquisition on the topic, “Why does the black man take to the cell phone so hard?” As for Mrs. Hollingsworth, her feverish imaginings dissolve with improbable lyricism in the end. The book concludes with a hollow encomium to hearth and home: “She had written her husband back into her life, her life back into itself.”

The character of Mrs. Hollingsworth first appeared in a short story, “Trick or Treat,” in Powell’s 1998 collection Aliens of Affection. She was a rounded and fascinating presence in the story, which told of her sly sexual flirtation with a smart-mouthed 12-year-old boy. The novel, on the other hand, reduces Mrs. Hollingsworth to a cardboard cipher for the book’s murky themes. When not taking easy aim at yuppie consumerism or the commodification of Civil War nostalgia, Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men is frustratingly abstruse. Perhaps one day an enterprising graduate student will give us an annotated version of the novel explaining its incoherence. (Academic pretension is another object of the book’s ridicule when Mrs. Hollingsworth finds herself mistakenly enrolled in a university course titled “Theorizing Diaspora, Adjudicating Hybridity.”)

Because the avant-garde impulse is so rarely represented or supported in mainstream literature, Padgett Powell deserves credit for attempting an energetic experimental work that recalls the 1960s and 70s heyday of writers like John Barth and Donald Barthelme. In fact, Barthelme was Powell’s writing teacher and mentor at the University of Houston in the 1980s. But this isn’t the kind of material that plays to Powell’s strengths of observation and droll verisimilitude. For those who are as yet unfamiliar with what an exceptional writer he is, the strongest evidence is to be found in Edisto, one of the best American novels of the last twenty years.

[Marc Regan]

There can be no doubt that Padgett Powell can write. A mean and meaningful sentence, as sublime and green as Key Limes, which is not to say I understand the entirety of his diatribe but enough to squint at the glint of the aforementioned, or hinted at, brilliant mind this writer projects on these pages like the light from Jimi Hendrix‘s masterful guitar work, licks as it were, (also wicked into this wild ride of a novel)and were it evah!

In all seriousness, this slim novel is challenging, in various ways that I will leave it to you to find, but it is well worth reading, and rereading, and again.

[Renee]

I have never read anything like this before ... and that is something special. There are no spoilers here but I think that it is important to tell you that the discomfort and confusion you are feeling initially ... you are probably supposed to and that is the confusion and the dense fog that Mrs. Hollingsworth lives within. I promise that you'll get it if you give it a chance. It is probably more meaningful for those of us who have some years of life and marital experience. I finally started to get it about 60% into the book and realized that my difficulty was me not letting go of my 'reality' and expecting the same in the book. I was writing some scathing reviews while I was reading, for sure. I should have just allowed myself to step into the 'fog' of Mrs. Hollingsworth. That is the point. How else am I supposed to understand. And if you're still not understanding, slow down. It's a short enough book, there is no need to rush. Take it easy, languish and wait for the magic. It's there. I think that I will read it again just to get it right ...

[wally]

padgett powell likes fiddling w/words throwing them together in combination rarely seen together: "a new petroleum air of virgin potential resides there, but only until the volvos and the skateboards pull in. the volvos discharge baby strollers and easy-listening fm, the skateboards the funk of boys, all taming the new wilderness."

thus wrote mrs. hollingsworth, 50-something, hell bent on purpose, or toward purpose, splay-footed or otherwise i can't tell.

mrs. hollingsworth "entertained this thought: she was losing her way. was she losing her way? the question presumed she had once not been losing her way. had she once not been losing her way?"

you can almost see the development of "interrogative mood" in the above quote.

this story was a delight to read, entertaining, hilarious, and god-forbid, thought-provoking. all those things you take for granted, powell questions, points at...look, see?

you may, as mrs. hollingsworth, "come to a halt."

but not before you reach the last page.

this one is worth a read.

i have no idea when i first read this one...some time in the last decade. i believe i've read it a number of times.

[Emi Yoshida]

Evocative of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, with non-conventional, stream of consciousness, and what I expected would be dinner party preparations. But although both are based on a 51-year old married woman with a 3-syllable surname, Mrs H is written in as masculine a hand as Mrs D is a feminine one; and the grocery list Mrs H is creating turns out to be more of a literary manifesto than anything to do with the collection of characters in her head that she may or may not have fed dessert to. The convoluted in-the-head ramblings were hard for me to follow at times, but ultimately delivered quite a satisfyingly tied-with-a-bow sort of ending.

[Jeff Laughlin]

This is a fantastic and absurd view of the modern south. Powell wrote the book Tom Robbins is incapable of writing; meaningful, funny and poignant without being ridiculous. It's believable at the same time as completely ungrounded. It releases all guards that Powell had earlier in his career and does so in a short amount of time.

Sorry about the Robbins jab... I just don't care about him at all.

[Fred]

I strongly encourage everyone to read Padgett Powell. You'll find quite the lyrical, often satirical, prose of an undervalued American writer of fathomless talent. And to say that his stories are uniquely original is to understate the case. This particular work made me laugh, made me giggle, and even made my shake my head in wonder more than a few times.
Padgett's ability to get inside his characters' heads is on full display here and the results are nothing less than grand entertainment.

[severyn]

For the first third I knew not what was going on, but then suddenly, like a rainfall of jigsaw pieces that land puzzle-perfect, it all became clear and good.
I like 'Edisto' more, but I like Mrs H's Men some much.

[Mary Schneider]

I am not surprised that so many reviewers hate this book; it certainly isn't for everyone. It is a delving, climbing, disecting, knitting kind of romp that maybe most will find pointless; but I loved.

[Chase]

Bonkers, with a surprisingly tender ending. I liked, I think, the bonkers parts the most---the scenery-chewing characters, the riffs on violence and war and politics and media and race. This book is a love-letter, in its way, to a particular version of the sun-cooked south (Jacksonville, in particular, my hometown) and also a stark and blunt criticism of it. Complex and (very) funny and willfully fragmented --- I'd love to teach it one day but need to become a more confident teacher before I do.

[Miles Smith]

This is a strange novel. It has a tremendous amount of promise, and Powell is excellent at his best. and Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men has redeeming qualities: it is atmospheric, and captures the daydreaming life of a middle aged southern woman. However it skips across boundaries in a way that seems more distracting than it does novel. It is at once noir, gothic, and southern, without ever truly becoming any of those.

[daniel]

there's a madman at the wheel who rumor has it fed his students bbq raccoon, so buckle up.

[Heidi Green]

I tried to get into this and failed. Twice.

[Patrick Barry]

I was not a fan of this book, paticularly its favorable treatment of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

[Margaret Carmel]

Maybe i'm not smart enough, but I just didn't get this book at all.

In this short novel, Padgett Powell uses the character of the constantly daydreaming Mrs. Hollingsworth attempt to say something about the south and southern literature. At least, that's what I think he was going for?

This is a weird swirl of characters who are never named, southern slang, and dreams that all blend together in a way that I just couldn't figure out what was happening. On top of the confusing nature of it, I felt like the message wasn't interesting enough for me to try and parse it out.

Meh. People in the reviews seem to connect with this book, but I just didn't get it *shrug*

[Richard]

Powell takes us steadily through the dog-brained logic of reason and the lack thereof--one step leads to the next, so once a shopping list incorporates a couple of lackeys touting a hologram machine projecting the figure of a Confederate general in order to find the man who represents the New South, we will only pursue that logic to its inevitable conclusion. Mrs. Hollingsworth battles her past and the open prospect of a Who Knows future, and her broken mind translates that accordingly.

[Lee Berger]

It was a fun read, but felt choppy. I absolutely loved the writing style from the beginning, but after the first chapter it seemed to rapidly undergo shifts and it took a while to figure out what was going on (but not in a good way). Regardless, it's a short book and worth reading for the writing, even if the story itself isn't what gripped me.

[Lauren Albert]

Strange and strangely endearing little book. Mrs. Hollingsworth's grocery list turns into something else entirely as she fantasizes herself out of her tedious life with her non-entity of a husband. Her daughters think she is losing her mind but she is finding it again.

[JBP]

I'm not generally a fan of books with a lot of stream of consciousness writing. It's just too meandering, all over the place and unfocused for me. This book employs that style and I found myself barely able to finish it.

[Debbie J]

Far be it from me to criticize a seemingly well-regarded author who teaches grad school-level writing. So, all I’ll say about Hologram is this:

[Kris McCracken]

Okay, I hated this book. Really hated it. Call it surreal. Call it post-modern. Call it meta. Whatever. I call it self-indulgent rubbish. F.

[Katie]

i wanted so much to like this more. i confess i couldn't keep up. i hate confessing that.

[Tom]

this is some weird stuff- at first. But after applying a little pressure, the barrier yields and inside is gorgeous, funny, awkwardly poetic, strangely beautiful writing.

[Jannie]

This book mesmerized me from the beginning. It flowed even though it took me some time to figure it out. I didn't want to stop reading.

[Glenn Evans]

3.5 stars.

I may not have the first clue what this little volume was about, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it...

[Earl]

A unique 140 page love letter.

[Sylvia Archer]

Just couldn’t get into it. May revisit.