From Publishers Weekly
After an excursion to New York City in his fine but atypical Plain and Normal (1998), Wilcox returns triumphantly to Tula Springs, La., the setting for most of his novels, starting with his dazzling debut, Modern Baptists (1983). Twenty years later, the author's quintessential Southern town still boasts its share of endearing eccentrics. A former college professor with a Ph.D. in music, Lou Jones writes a monthly column for the North American Bassoon Society newsletter, but she earns her bread as the receptionist at WaistWatch, a fundamentalist-owned "makeover franchise." ("Every day at WaistWatch is Christmas, the franchise's orientation booklet explains. Every client is gifted every day with a rise in self-esteem.") Lou's friend and fellow employee, Maigrite, who has one leg shorter than the other, is too proud to park in the WaistWatch handicap space and is always taking Lou's spot. So in an effort to create a proper parking space for Maigrite, Lou tries to cover the blue handicap lines with ivory paint (the asphalt's "pits and humps ruining her straight line"), thereby attracting the unwelcome attention of Mrs. Melvin Tudie, the local tax assessor. This is just one of many small, interlocking incidents in a comic plot that doesn't seem to go much of anywhere, yet manages to make some subtle points about such serious issues as racial and religious tolerance. Wilcox's eye for the telling detail is as unerring as ever, his dead-on dialogue sparkles with Southern charm and his affection for his well-meaning if often misguided characters is infectious. Once again he shows that gentle, civilized humor can be quite as effective as the more over-the-top variety. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Wilcox, director of Louisiana State University's creative writing program, has set most of his fiction in the small town of Tula Springs, Louisiana. His newest novel is not only set there but also reprises some characters originally introduced by Wilcox 20 years ago in his hilarious first novel, Modern Baptists, which is listed in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon (1994). Lou Jones, moving through her fifties at too rapid a pace, is unhappy: her husband lost his job and moved out of their $300,000 "Cajun cabin" and is now living in his parents' house. Plus, Lou, who minds everyone's business except her own, has a doctorate in music but makes more money working as the receptionist for a fundamentalist health club than she could ever earn at the state college. Wilcox adds in some dizzying subplots involving Lou's oldest friend, a scandal at the college, a group of militant lesbians, and marital infidelity. Wilcox's comic sensibility and compassionate heart animate this bittersweetly humorous novel. But the ending? It's the ultimate in literary ambiguity. Nancy Pearl
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

The New York Times Book Review
Wilcox brilliantly navigates the fine line between hilarity and pathos.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One doesn’t read Heavenly Days as much as live it with Lou Jones.

Book Description
Over the course of twenty years and eight novels, James Wilcox has established himself as one of the most distinctive and beloved voices of the South, a comic master whose work has been praised by writers as diverse as Robert Penn Warren and Anne Tyler. From Modern Baptists to Plain and Normal, he has charted the collision of the stubbornly genteel Old South with a world of franchise food and ethnic diversity, as time-cherished manners and mores threaten to vanish completely. In Heavenly Days—his first novel in five years—Wilcox returns to the familiar landscape of Tula Springs, Louisiana, and introduces Lou Jones, a sweetly hapless heroine trying to come to terms with a way of life for which she is utterly unequipped.

About the Author
James Wilcox is the author of eight novels. The director of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University, he was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In Heavenly Days, his first novel in five years, James Wilcox returns to the familiar landscape of Tula Springs, Louisiana, and introduces a sweetly hapless heroine trying to come to terms with a way of life for which she is utterly unequipped. Lou Jones - middle-aged, well educated, and faultlessly sensitive - has found herself unaccountably living in a $295,000 faux-Cajun cabin (her husband's dream house) and working as the receptionist in a fundamentalist health emporium housed in a defunct train station. Hardly the thing for a Ph.D. in music theory, yet Lou consoles herself with making valuable contributions to the American Bassoon Society's newsletter, and with drawing the town's spiritually needy citizens into her beneficent orbit. But her well-meaning interventions soon involve her in a series of increasingly complicated misunderstandings, as she become embroiled in evading a gun-toting tax collector, trying to befriend her aloof housekeeper and her unnervingly elegant mother, waging an ongoing and fruitless battle over the ownership of her husband's childhood home, and wrestling with a hotly disputed loblolly dresser. These are all distractions, though, from Lou's true, if unacknowledged, aim: to find the grace of heaven in the days of her own life through the bonds of love.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

A little of such quirkiness goes a long way. And the amount that piles up in Heavenly Days would ordinarily be smothering. But Mr. Wilcox manages a peculiar balancing act, offsetting a nerve-jangling array of cute gambits with such outlandish flourishes that a reader would follow him anywhere. Though he has been compared to writers from Chekhov to Anne Tyler, he comes across as more of a Bible-belt Wodehouse this time. — Janet Maslin

The Washington Post

Even if Wilcox lacks Pynchon's gleeful slapstick or Orwell's brooding sobriety, he still combines elements of both into a unique and potent comedy of errors. The territory he claims as his own in Heavenly Days shares a border with that of Eric Kraft -- the only American author since Pynchon to completely erase the line between the literary novel and the spit-out-your-coffee comedy -- and we can only hope for the chance to spend more time there in the coming years. — Andrew Ervin

Publishers Weekly

After an excursion to New York City in his fine but atypical Plain and Normal (1998), Wilcox returns triumphantly to Tula Springs, La., the setting for most of his novels, starting with his dazzling debut, Modern Baptists (1983). Twenty years later, the author's quintessential Southern town still boasts its share of endearing eccentrics. A former college professor with a Ph.D. in music, Lou Jones writes a monthly column for the North American Bassoon Society newsletter, but she earns her bread as the receptionist at WaistWatch, a fundamentalist-owned "makeover franchise." ("Every day at WaistWatch is Christmas, the franchise's orientation booklet explains. Every client is gifted every day with a rise in self-esteem.") Lou's friend and fellow employee, Maigrite, who has one leg shorter than the other, is too proud to park in the WaistWatch handicap space and is always taking Lou's spot. So in an effort to create a proper parking space for Maigrite, Lou tries to cover the blue handicap lines with ivory paint (the asphalt's "pits and humps ruining her straight line"), thereby attracting the unwelcome attention of Mrs. Melvin Tudie, the local tax assessor. This is just one of many small, interlocking incidents in a comic plot that doesn't seem to go much of anywhere, yet manages to make some subtle points about such serious issues as racial and religious tolerance. Wilcox's eye for the telling detail is as unerring as ever, his dead-on dialogue sparkles with Southern charm and his affection for his well-meaning if often misguided characters is infectious. Once again he shows that gentle, civilized humor can be quite as effective as the more over-the-top variety. (Sept. 15) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews