All Good Things by Lev Butts
Parsival by Richard Monaco When I was a teenager, as many of you know, I discovered on the shelves of an Atlanta used bookstore the book that would figuratively chart the course of my life: Richard Monaco’s Parsival or a Knight’s Tale . The story is not new. I have told it time and again both here and elsewhere. But I am a Southerner and one thing we Southerners excel at is telling the same story over and over with little or no diminishing of interest. So you’ve heard this story before but not in this way. I had skipped school that day and gone to Oxford II Books. I often did this. I wouldn’t skip school and hang out at bowling alleys, movie houses, or amusement parks; I would go to bookstores or libraries and read all day. My teachers knew about it. My dad knew about it. It wouldn’t go unpunished, mind you: My father would scratch out an embarrassing note (“Please excuse Lev from school yesterday,” he would write, “he woke up with exploding diarrhea and stomach cramps. I fel...