Novelists lie for a living — what is a novel, after all, but an assembly of fibs paradoxically meant to illustrate something true? — but generally see a distinction between lying on the page and lying off it. If Winston Lorimar, the once-celebrated author of
Lieutenant Lucius and the Tristate Crematory Band, is aware of this distinction, he doesn’t show it, which makes Lorimar either the purest novelist alive — a 24/7 fount of fiction, his life and his work indivisibly fused — or, as some in his hometown of Greenwood, Mississippi, would have it, just a lying sumbitch. The truth, as ever, probably lies somewhere in between.
Lorimar is 69, and 40 years removed from the publication of his one and only book, but to know Lorimar — as I have since 1995 — is to experience, woozily, the fictive limbo at the heart of any novel...