He ends up falling in love with the town and eventually buying all of it, getting to know all the locals, and becoming a regular fixture on its streets. For example, he gets stranded in a small town called Specter while out on business. No matter where he goes, he makes a big impression. He travels the world over, making friends and having adventures along the way. navy sailors, and his own son, twice.īeing in one place for too long depresses Edward, so, after marrying William's mother, Sandra, he builds a successful business for himself as a traveling salesman. He saves the life of a young girl, several U.S. Edward can communicate with animals, gets along with all kinds of people (including a carnivorous giant), and has a preternatural gift for sensing danger. When he's nine-years-old, it snows for the first time ever in Alabama, and he and his father build a sixteen-feet-tall snowman. His birth, during the "driest summer in forty years" (5) in the small town of Ashland, Alabama, brings with it a heavy rainstorm. In his own mythology, Edward is special from the beginning. Never passing judgement or expressing disbelief, he presents them just as Edward did: “rue story" (11).
William narrates all but one of these stories, as he's heard his father tell them many times over the course of his life. As William remarks, everything Edward "did was without parallel" (16). The novel jumps between the present time, during which Edward lays dying of an unnamed, incurable illness, and the past, told through a series of fabulous anecdotes, presented in chronological order, beginning with Edward's birth.
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