Exiting the Bluegrass Turnpike

Silliman's Exiting the Bluegrass Turnpike is a queer post-modern coming-of-age tale with a Southern Gothic checklist of dysfunctional characters and topics. Set in the early 1980s, Silliman captures the culture of the early Reagan era. It is as if Silliman's cultural narrative referenced The Official Preppy Handbook by Birnbach, Roberts, Wallace and Willey (1980) and accurately describes not just the fashion, but WASP attitudes of the age, quickly giving the reader insight into old money Kentucky. Silliman's prose is structured like a memoir with vocabulary choices bordering on a Racine tragedy. His protagonist lacks many typical characteristics associated with the traditional hero, but by no means would you call Silliman's champion an antihero. Plathian influences and overtones shadow throughout from its opening sentence to its last chapter, while satisfactorily not materializing the emblematic stereotypes. Exiting the Bluegrass Turnpike has all the mood of The Bell Jar, is chockfull with an erotic Capote-styled doomed romance, and many apparitions of Southern Gothic stock characters any reader of the genre will recognize and enjoy.