In Memory of Junior was published by Algonquin Books in 1992. The Bales and Copeland families — connected by marriage, geography, and decades of accumulated grievance — converge when a death exposes a problem: the family burial plot has been partially sold to an outsider, and the resulting dispute over who gets buried where becomes a proxy for every unresolved conflict in the extended family.
Edgerton uses the burial plot dispute as a narrative engine to explore the full ecology of a Southern family: the matriarch who rules through guilt, the uncle who rules through money, the cousin who married poorly, the brother who left and the brother who stayed, the in-laws who are tolerated but never fully accepted. The comedy arises from the gap between what these people say and what they mean — the elaborate codes of Southern politeness that allow people who dislike each other intensely to sit at the same dinner table and pass the biscuits.
The novel introduced the Bales family, who would recur in several subsequent Edgerton novels, creating a loosely connected fictional community in the tradition of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County — though Edgerton’s vision of the South is gentler, funnier, and less gothic than Faulkner’s.
Collecting In Memory of Junior
First edition (Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, 1992): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$30
- Very good/very good: $5–$15