What You Cannot Tell: A Novel
This is the story of Everett Moon, a white man who returns to his hometown in north Georgia after a teaching career at a historically black college, which has dismissed him for cause after almost thirty years. Though his brother still lives in town and invites him to share his house, Everett takes up residence in an extended-stay motel, where he spends his days looking through the boxes he brought with him and reviewing the materials that document his teaching career. Everett's life has been unusual in a variety of ways, and the details of his experiences, especially during his first year at the college, are the focus of the novel. This is a story of a solitary and troubled man, now unwell and living out his last days, who searches in a somewhat haphazard way for perspective and understanding, and for forgiveness. At its heart, WHAT YOU CANNOT TELL is concerned with, as Flannery O'Connor said fiction must be, "those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth."