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ANDY, OPIE, AND THE GANG OFFER SOLACE TO A NORTH CAROLINA NATIVE

By Jonathan Miles

Looking for Andy Griffith: A Father’s Journey, The University of North Carolina Press, $28 Halfway through Looking for Andy Griffith: A Father’s Journey, Evan Dalton Smith’s deep, knotty dive into his adulation for the late actor and North Carolina icon, I found myself reminded, weirdly, of another book: Prague, Arthur Phillips’s 2002 novel about twentysomething expats in Budapest in the heady wake of the Berlin Wall’s collapse. Phillips’s nostalgia-plagued characters find real life to be somewhere out of reach, “trapped in the amber of some heirloom era,” as Phillips wrote about the book, or dwarfed by the “glories of the future and the fairytale splendor of the past.” They go about the novel plagued with suspicions that real life is happening in Prague—that’s the joke of the title—while they’re stuck…

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Garden & Gun (Digital) - 1 Issue, June/July 2024

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