The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens

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Modeled on the classic 18th-century picaresques like Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling and Defoe’s Moll Flanders, The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens is the modern-day bildungsroman of a prodigiously attractive young Texan named Lyle Clemens. Lyle is kind of a holy fool who, like Chance in Being There, illuminates the actions, motivations, and prejudices of others through his lack of cynicism. He is a simple babe, in the woods of Texas and Los Angeles.Lyle’s mother, Sylvia, is a beautiful woman who was raised Pentecostal and rebelled against her mother through sexuality—but her dreams to become Miss America were dashed by her mother in a particularly traumatic way, and Lyle’s father (Lyle the First, a dashing cowboy), who consoled her in her time of need, left her when she became pregnant, leaving only money for an abortion Sylvia never got. Sylvia never talks about her own childhood or Lyle I, and takes refuge in alcohol; an...