Leland and Diane

The Unlikely Journey of Leland and Diane 

By Edward M. George 

Tnsb, 2024 

Paperback: $23.95 

Genre: Novel 

Reviewed by Edward Journey 

Literature is full of stories of the ouster of a fading privileged class by a rising working class. On a small and nonconfrontational scale, that is the main throughline of Edward M. George’s first novel, The Unlikely Journey of Leland and Diane, set in the last decade of the twentieth century in small but busy Libertytown in Creek County, Alabama. In Libertytown, everybody knows your name and your business, and the movers and shakers gather daily at Danny’s Diner to gauge the climate of the town. The arrival of a stranger might precipitate an investigation yielding positive results that the locals have an easy time decoding. Even the mothers-in-law are salt of the earth and get along, although one matriarch must take a moment when she gets an inkling of what a Yankee transplant’s fortune might be “worth.”   

Edward M. George’s first book of short stories, Starlight and Other Stories, was reviewed here last year. Before turning to fiction, he published four books of poetry. George, a retired attorney, Vietnam veteran, and former Alabama Assistant Attorney General, often writes about good people avoiding conflict. Serendipity is an important factor in George’s fiction, and the “unlikely journey” of the current book’s title is an apt description. Each new character seems to be the harbinger of good news and propitious deals, and all of life’s challenges seem to be in the past.  

Leland and Diane Johnson are a young married couple living in a rented trailer as the novel begins. Leland works at a lumber mill and as a carpenter and cabinetmaker with his father, and Diane waits tables at the diner. As they start a family, opportunities arise at a dazzling pace, and the couple’s many talents are revealed. Diane is an impressive painter whose gallery shows sell out; Leland is a skilled musician and singer, sought after by top producers after a song co-written with his father receives a Grammy nomination. 

The “Moore Sisters,” Melanie Pebworth and Beth Lancaster, daughters of a prominent family married to sons of prominent families, serve as a sort of catty Greek Chorus as they observe the goings-on of Libertytown, especially the rapid rise of Leland and Diane and their families. Self-described as “spoiled shallow” women, their amazement at the good fortune of Diane and Leland gradually turns to alarm and a hint of jealousy as they begin to see their prominent place in the community undermined. Beth and Melanie’s conversations are utilized to provide much of the backstory of the novel. 

George has chosen the challenge of presenting the novel in the present tense, utilizing long, stiff expository conversations to provide backstory. Details of a character’s retirement plans take up an entire chapter. There are detailed descriptions of mergers and acquisitions, a hotel renovation, the history of Jews in Mobile, and what is playing on the radio between Muscle Shoals and Libertytown. George has an attorney’s eye for detail, and minutiae and events are sometimes broken down to the minute (“Red returns at 4:40 … At 4:55 the doorbell rings, … At exactly five o’clock, the doorbell rings again … By six o’clock the food is on the table…”). 

Edward George’s fiction specializes in precise slice-of-life portraits of small-town environs, relatively gentle class collisions, and families without conflict – or whose conflicts are in the rearview. He focuses on the customs and mores of a disappearing culture. Such an optimistic and uncomplicated worldview is a rarity in the contemporary fiction of our fraught and alienated society.   

Edward Journey, a retired university professor and theatre professional living in Birmingham, regularly shares his essays in the online journal “Professional Southerner” (www.professionalsoutherner.com).