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- Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer
"Too Close to Call pulls off a rare novelistic hat trick with
dazzling elan: It gives us a resonant and vivid fictional
landscape, an utterly engaging narrator, and a tone that mixes
hilarity and gravity so intimately and brilliantly that you
downright don't know how to identify those tears you're
producing. Toomey Spooner's quest for public office in Oceana,
Kentucky, makes for a moving and delightful literary experience.
And, not incidentally, its creator, Michael Kelsay, has
instantly established himself as one of our finest writers."
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"Rural politics in the South gets a thorough skewering in
[this] lively debut novel . . . Kelsay is a talented, funny
writer, nimbly working the same turf mined by the likes of Lewis
Nordan and Larry Brown. Toomey Spooner is an engaging hero whose
musings and terrors enliven a larky narrative that takes
substance from its undercurrent of loss and regret."
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- Author of Natural Man, Famous People
I Have Known, and A Congress of Wonders
"Michael Kelsay brings a fresh new voice to contemporary
southern fiction--wry, ironic, irreverent, sharp as the best-
dressed guy at the dance--and Too Close to Call is a volatile
Appalachian admixture of booze, dope, and politics. Be warned:
This impressive debut novel may go to your head."
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- For the Louisville Eccentric Observer
"Too Close to Call is a corker of a debut novel. Nominally a
comic social satire, the story is actually a pretty powerful
moral allegory dressed up in the post-modern costume of irony.
It is laugh-out- loud funny at every turn, on every page. There
are also charming recipes for down-home Southern dishes as well
as soul food reminiscent of early Kurt Vonnegut. And Kelsay's
prose combines the best of (believe it or not) Larry Brown, Mark
Twain and Raymond Chandler."
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"The black humor of this first novel is both eerie and down
to earth. Set in Eastern Kentucky, this novel both exalts the
landscape and makes humorous and human the people who inhabit
it. Toomey Spooner, a 39-year-old adolescent, tries to find
himself by running for mayor of Oceana, Kentucky (his slogan
"Vote the Goat"). The Goat, overcoming great odds, gets the
marijuana vote, a group of black farmers, and everyone lives
happily ever after--maybe. In this case, with these characters,
the only sure thing is humor and chaos."
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- For the Louisville Voice-Tribune
"My favorite [book] for 2001? Too Close to Call, by Michael Kelsay, is
a funny, bawdy novel about Kentucky politics. And Kelsay writes
like a dream. Too Close to Call is chockablock with wonderful
characters and strange couplings guaranteed to offend quite a
few readers . . ."
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- Chair, Department of Creative Writing, University of
Texas, El-Paso
"Mike Kelsay's writing insists, in its knowing irreverence,
on doing us Kentuckians the honor of depicting us as we are--not
as wholesome, clueless bumpkins, but rather as fully human,
cagey, fit to survive, if sometimes maniacal, reckless, and
hellbent on our own destruction. He treats us as children of
God, as Cormac McCarthy might use that phrase. His novel Too
Close to Call is deeply redemptive at its core. While it may be
premature to make predictions, I honestly believe that in time,
this novel will come to be thought of with the kind of ardor
reserved for such iconic novels as James Still's River of
Earth."
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Eileen Abel
- For the Lexington Herald-Leader
"While Kelsay avoids angst-ridden musings about the meaning
of life, he does voice one man's struggle to achieve some kind
of awareness about himself and his world. And what a
spectacularly memorable world it is--when, finally, the events
of an otherwise unexceptional man's life are raised to symbolic
significance. Too Close to Call is a great read."
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