Captain Saturday: A Novel

Plot

Will Baggett, TV weatherman, is probably the biggest celebrity in Raleigh, North Carolina, and he sure does like that "Yo, Will, what's the weather?" people call out, echoing his station's promotion campaign. With a nice house, a son in medical school, and a wife who's become one of the top brokers stoking the heedless real estate rush in north Raleigh, Will has the perfect life. But overnight a nasty conglomerate buys his station and throws him out, he's arrested for running a red light, he badly injures his knee, and he begins to see both that his marriage is in danger of crumbling, and that his son doesn't like him much. Then the past he thought he didn't have comes calling, in the person of his cousin Wingfoot Baggett, who collects a bewildered Will for some R&R back home, on the banks of the Cape Fear River. How Will comes to terms with his history, sorts out his legal dilemmas, reinvents himself, gets to know his son, and maybe, just maybe, reconciles with his wife, is the subject of Bob Inman's graceful, comic, and poignant novel. In a larger sense, this is also a novel about how the New South, with its booming economy and newly minted cities, is stamping out the Old South, losing in the process a sense of tradition and identity.