From the lead couple in It Happened One Night to the lead couple in Titanic, the best written or filmed romances contain a man and a woman with different world-views who must alter their own world-view enough to encompass each other. Such a romantic coupling we are treated to in Clyde Edgerton’s Raney. Raney and her newly wed husband Charles are night and day in their personalities, beliefs, and backgrounds. The only thing they truly share in common is a love of country music. Raney’s style is engaging because the descriptive narrative is broken up with plenty of dialogue between the characters, at times taking on the style of a journal of diary. As one critic said of Edgerton’s style in a review of another of his novels, the same of which could be applied to the style of Raney, “Trouble seems a little more detached, a little less fondly observed, like and anthropologist taking notes on a curious, doomed civilization. But his feel for the funny bone in the human skeleton remains dead on” (McDaniel 2). While Raney contains many serious episodes, such as the suicide of Raney’s Uncle Nate, it sustains itself on a wave of laughs regarding the foibles and idiosyncrasies of two families rendered “blood kin” (the title of Chapter One) by the marriage of Raney and Charles. This analysis will explore the character of Raney, a young woman who the author seems to argue is solely the product of social learning (or lack of it) before she begins to broaden her perceptions through her marriage to Charles.
Raney is a girl whose world view is the product of strictly adopting her family’s views coupled with a devout adherence to Free Will Baptist ideology. Raney is a country girl and Charles from a big city. While Charles likes privacy, detests unannounced visitors, and is an avid reader, Raney loves socializing, enjoys unannounced company and prefers visiting to a good book. Raney is also a bit of a prude. She is horri...