The Floatplane Notebooks was published by Algonquin Books in 1988. The novel spans four generations of the Copeland family in rural North Carolina, from the Civil War through the 1970s. Each chapter is narrated by a different family member, and the collective effect is a chorus of voices — some wise, some foolish, some dead — that construct the family’s history the way actual families do: through competing recollections, strategic omissions, and stories told so often they have hardened into myth.
The central myth is the floatplane: a boat that various Copeland men have been trying to convert into a flying machine for generations. The project is simultaneously a joke (it will never work), a symbol (the family’s stubborn refusal to accept limitations), and a genuine engineering effort (each generation gets a little closer). The floatplane is the family’s version of the American dream — perpetually under construction, never quite airborne, and impossible to abandon.
Edgerton’s handling of the multiple narrators is masterful. Each voice is distinct — the Civil War ancestor who speaks in formal nineteenth-century prose, the Vietnam-era cousin who speaks in clipped contemporary American, the grandmother who speaks in the cadences of Baptist testimony — and the transitions between them are managed without the reader ever losing the thread. The result is Edgerton’s richest novel: funnier than Raney, deeper than Walking Across Egypt, and more structurally ambitious than either.
Collecting The Floatplane Notebooks
First edition (Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, 1988): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good/very good: $8–$20