Season 4, Episode 36
Originally recorded: 12/12/2022
Length: 01:07:03
Three Dashes Bitters by Jack Simmons
We are missing Reba today, but welcome Ape’s daughter Rue, and Georgia Southern University Philosophy professor, playwright, and novelist, Dr. Jack Simmons. Jack joins the podcast to discuss cocktails. great Scotch, and his New Orleans set book Three Dashes Bitters.
Links for this episode
Three Dashes Bitters by Jack Simmons
Three Dashes Bitters
Author: Jack Simmons
Genre: Fiction
Published: 2019
Pages: 306
Description (from Goodreads)
When Tim Schmidt returns to New Orleans to attend his sister’s debutante ball, he finds that nothing has changed during his three-year hiatus in the orderly sanctuary of Boston.
He is still in love with Jane, a hard-drinking iconoclast, too well-bred to join the ranks of the Generation X slackers, yet unable to accept the standards of her high society upbringing. Happily, it seems Jane might still harbor feelings for him.
But over drinks at The Columns Hotel, things get messy, and Tim’s grand return to the city of his birth soon unravels—the very sort of thing that inspired Tim to leave NOLA in the first place.
With only twenty-four hours to figure out what to do (which has never been Tim’s forte), this former philosophy student finds unsolicited advice from members of a new leisure class. There is Milton, Tim’s college roommate turned Marxist revolutionary, a Falstaffian gent bent on overthrowing the government. Two young Arizona “brothers from another mother.” A disillusioned German exchange student who has abandoned the study of physics for the French Quarter social scene. And an Italian fellow who is a self-proclaimed master in the art of amore.
Picking up where Walker Percy (The Moviegoer) and John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces) left off, this wild romp presents New Orleans as an eternal city, whose characters exceed the vicissitudes of fortune, functioning instead as a universal canvas upon which individuals must struggle to carve out their existence. This is not the NOLA of Hurricane Katrina, political corruption, crime, tourism, or the home of jazz. Rather, Simmons adds to the literary œuvre of this Southern city, and Three Dashes Bitters captures a New Orleans defined only in the individuals we encounter—not the easy stereotypes that make individuality impossible.
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