North of Patagonia

Whether inside or outside the ring, boxer Clay Justin is better at taking punishment than dishing it out. His ex-girlfriend hates him. His best friend has vanished. His main rival is a mauler known for hitting opponents below the belt. And his ex-wife has come up with a way to deal an even lower blow: she has begun to write about him. North of Patagonia, Johnny Payne's black comic meditation on love and romance, portrays both cityscapes and the inner lives of the characters with sharpness and sly humor. Clay searches for his best friend Balboa Trafalgar, a flamboyant doctor with a weakness for women and shady deals. Clay juggles the attention of Carmela, Balboa's vivacious mistress, with Kelly, his own ex-wife and the mother of his daughter. What he doesn't know is that Kelly is working on a romance novel featuring a protagonist named Clay, where all the women are beautiful and troubled and all the men are good-looking and unreliable, a novel, in short, mirroring her ex-husband's life - and perhaps controlling the events of it. Beyond the witty play on genre, however, North of Patagonia is a study of the fight to maintain loyalties to oneself, loved ones, race, and class. The struggle takes its toll but, like many a boxer, these characters continue to step into the ring, borne up by hopes and big hearts. This fourth novel by Johnny Payne, laced with dark humor, takes us into subworlds from Kentucky harness racing to urban blues clubs to the Chicago boxing scene to South Beach hedonism. His characters, from Lakeshore black elites to the white working stiffs of Hooftown, live by their wits, able to outfox everyone but themselves.