“PENELOPE LEMON: GAME ON!” by Inman Majors (Louisiana State University Press, 232 pages, $26).
Midway upon life’s journey, the hero of Inman Majors’ new comic novel, “Penelope Lemon: Game On!,” finds herself at an impasse. Her second marriage has ended; her son is being targeted by bullies; she lives in her parents’ basement and waits tables at an ersatz frontier roadhouse called Coonskins.
Penelope allows herself a brief look backward to see where everything went wrong. Why hadn’t she finished college or pursued a career? “She’d just gotten too complacent,” she realizes. So, as the title suggests, she decides to take action. Let the games begin.
“Penelope Lemon: Game On!” by Inman Majors (Contributed photo by Chapter16.org)Majors, a Knoxville native who attended Vanderbilt, pays homage here to P.G. Wodehouse’s “Bertie and Jeeves.” He continually tosses his protagonist into overlapping muddles, where her problems compound until, through grit and guile, she finally devises solutions.
She is aided by an amusing cast of oddballs from her Virginia hometown, including her first husband, “a huge, huge redneck” (or “the HHR”), a double modifier that’s necessary to distinguish him from the rest of the locals: “Basically, if you were from Hillsboro, Virginia, and weren’t a doctor or lawyer’s kid, you likely had a bit of red about the neck, no matter how well you did in school,” she says.