StevenssInT

The Town provides a closer look at the Stevenses' family relationships than any other Yoknapatawpha fiction. Gavin Stevens narrates eight of the novel's 23 chapters, and is perhaps the major if anti-heroic character in two of its three main plot lines; this second volume of the Snopes trilogy is as much about him as it is about Flem - if not more. It is revealed for the first time that Maggie Mallison is Gavin's twin sister, and their closeness provides her husband, Charles Sr., with a more dramatic (if even more anti-heroic) part than he played in his four previous appearances. Their son Charles Jr., "Chick," narrates eight chapters too, including the first one. He has not even been born when the novel begins, and is an adolescent when it ends. As in the Knight's Gambit stories, he is much closer to his "Uncle Gavin" than to his "Father," but though he grows up amid the tensions in his own family and the sexual misbehavior of other adults, none of the narrators - the third is V.K. Ratliff - show much interest in his interior life.