The latest addition to my website is Joanna Scott‘s Fading, My Parmacheene Belle, the author’s first novel. Joanna Scott is one of those authors who writes very intelligent novels but somehow seems to get lost in the shuffle. This book, for example, is out of print. It is part fable, part extended fishing metaphor, part old age novel, part picaresque story. The unnamed narrator, an angler/backwoodsman, has been married for fifty-three years to a woman he calls My Parmacheene Belle (a type of fishing fly). They have one child, a mentally disabled son in a home. When she dies of cancer (he blames her for abandoning him), he is visited after the funeral by Gibble, his erstwhile companion and cousin of his late wife, who introduced the pair to one another but who has now become his nemesis. In his anger with Gibble, he throws a chair, hitting the boy. He thinks he has killed him, so he runs off. On his journey, he will be joined by a young woman he calls a mermaiden, who he later learns is running away from her father, and they go off together, looking for the narrator’s wife home town. The two pass through the city before arriving at the sea on their picaresque journey. It is an excellent novel for a first novel though not necessarily an easy one, presumably why it has not had the success it deserves.