Mary-Louise Parker: The town was in the middle of the deep South. The summers were long and the months of winter cold were very few. Nearly always the sky was a glassy, brilliant azure and the sun burned down riotously bright. Then the light, chill rains of November would come, and perhaps later there would be frost and some short months of cold. The winters were changeable, but the summers always were burning hot. The town was a fairly large one. On the main street there were several blocks of two- and three-story shops and business offices. But the largest buildings in the town were the factories, which employed a large percent¬age of the population. These cotton mills were big and flourish¬ing and most of the workers in the town were poor. Often in the faces along the streets there was the desperate look of hunger and of loneliness.
Alan Arkin: It’s about isolation and the desperate need for people to jump out of that situation.
Ethelbert Miller: It’s a book that in which is dealing with poverty as a theme: its poverty in the South. It’s a thing in terms of, how do we organize to improve our condition.
Blake Hazard: It takes the perspective of a number of different characters living in this small town in the south who are so isolated—not just from the rest of the world in the sense of being in a rural setting—but really from one another.
Jim White: It’s a character-driven novel with beautiful portraits, compassionate portraits of people who don’t normally get portrayed.
Edward Albee: The title describes it pretty well: the ultimate impossibility of really making complete contact with anybody, and you have to find it within yourself.