Fulton County Author:James Goldman Fulton County itself looks like Paradise; and the town of Fulton--placid, prosperous, and beautiful--is surrounded by old family farms, lakes, woods, and, of course, a country club. — Then, into this picture-postcard world, comes Talker and his girlie show. Talker is the kind of man most women look at twice. A jack of many trades, a loner, rootle... more »ss, always on the move and with no permanent address, he revels in the gift of speech, whether he is using it to lure men to see the show or women into his bed.
When Marcie Van Buren meets Talker, the sexual time bomb that was always buried under Fulton County begins to tick. The moment Talker sees Marcie he realizes she is everything he ever dreamed of: lovely, intelligent, well bred, and well mannered. Marcie is a lady. And the moment Marcie sees Talker she realizes that, despite her position on the top rung of Fulton society, despite her being presumably happily married and the mother of a teen-aged daughter, she has been suffocating, starving in the midst of plenty.
When their affair begins, neither Talker nor Marcie has the least idea of what lies ahead, how far they'll go, what they will come to mean and do to each other. Nor do they know that their mutual passion will inevitably affect the lives of everyone around them, starting with Marcie's own family: her husband, Van, decent, caring, and repressed; her daughter, Betsy, bursting into adolescence and eager to grow up in a hurry; her gutsy, self-made father, Ed; and her mother, Harriet, a woman flawless to a fault who wears her virtue like a neon sign. And Dee, her oldest friend, who left Fulton twenty years before to pursue a Broadway career and has now returned seeking to cure childhood wounds that have never healed.
On Talker's side there are the women from the show: Norma, the tough old broad who owns it; Skipper, Laurel, and Pauline, the strippers who dream of love and marriage, of lives they'll never lead; and Annie, ravishing and scrappy, fresh from home and still a virgin.
And caught in the middle are the people of Fulton: Lucy, wild and lusty at eighteen, desperate to be out on her own; her father, Barney, virtuous, God-fearing, churchgoing, with a dark side to his soul; her boyfriend, Marvin, none too bright but loyal; and Marvin's father, Walt, a man with little in his past and nothing in his future.
By the end of the novel, the lives of all will have changed--and Paradise will never again be the same.« less