Playing Naked with the Prometean Gift

"Playing Naked with the Promethean Gift" is the story of a mother and son's struggle to reconstruct their lives abd their relationship with each other in the wake of the husband and father's death. Set in North Florida in the 1960's, the novel opens with a Tallahassee high school football team playing a game in Pensacola in a driving rain storm on the night of the Kennedy assassination. Bewildered by his lack of empathy for the slain President and the millions grieving his passing. Calvin Jaynes is further disoriented by encounters with alcohol, a whore and the grief of a black bellman. When he returns to Tallahassee he learns that his father is dying of cancer. As the disease progresses, the son is drawn to his father and the mysteries of death and grief, while his mother fearfully begins distancing herself from her financial and emotional dependence upon her husband.
The mother's journey is one of sexual reawakening and self discovery. Her unplanned diving board striptease at a swingers' pool party leads her to a series of sexual adventures that cause her to come to terms with her own complicity in the soul deadening boredom of her married life. Calvin concentrates on running and football in order to provide himself with a sense of contol and as an opportunity to prove his courage, but he is lost and bewildered in the strange territory of first love and loss. The story unfolds in the context of an emerging South, in which race, religion, birth control and Vietnam loom large.