The Whole World in His Hand

Gillis Gilford is in love-again; but, this time the object of his affection is a flesh-and-blood creature, a new waitress at his daddy's diner where he works as cook and manager. However, she does bear a striking resemblance to a young beauty from a magazine that he saw, and that resemblance soon leads to a road-trip from Mesopotamia, Kentucky, to Nashville, Tennessee. Gillis and the new waitress, Jeanette, are accompanied by Gillis's best friend, Waugh, and Ruth Ann Belcher, another...
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Gillis Gilford is in love-again; but, this time the object of his affection is a flesh-and-blood creature, a new waitress at his daddy's diner where he works as cook and manager. However, she does bear a striking resemblance to a young beauty from a magazine that he saw, and that resemblance soon leads to a road-trip from Mesopotamia, Kentucky, to Nashville, Tennessee. Gillis and the new waitress, Jeanette, are accompanied by Gillis's best friend, Waugh, and Ruth Ann Belcher, another waitress from the diner. Along the way the group stops at a drive-in movie double-feature, does not hit a possum, attends a wedding, attends a funeral, and eats at a variety of diners. Meanwhile, Charles Bland, science-fiction and fantasy writer from Cincinnati, is searching for the same young woman from the same magazine that inspired Gillis's infatuation; Bland's mission is to make her his bride, which does not set well with Purity Bliss, the erstwhile object of his desires and fictional heroine of his novels. Also traveling the highways and byways of Kentucky is Tristan Shoat, folklore graduate student, who is researching names for his dissertation: The Sociological and Psycho-Linguistic Effects of the Name on the Common Man. The novel follows the disparate groups as they travel toward the final scene in Nashville, a showdown fraught with heroic derring-do, near-spiritual revelations, and a soupcon of denouement for those who need that sort of thing.