David Payne (novelist)

Published by Houghton Mifflin in 1984, Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street tells the story of an orphaned Taoist monk, Sun I—love child of a Chinese mother and a WWII American combat ace in China with the storied Flying Tigers. Sun I grows up in remote Sichuan Province and sets out for New York in search of his father, scion of a famous robber baron family, and of the "Tao within the Dow." Reviewing Payne's novel in The Washington Post Book World, Joseph McLellan wrote, "This novel, with its glorious style and rich profusion of detail, should remind readers of the time, fading into memory, when the works of John Barth began to burst on the literary horizon... absorbing and deeply rewarding." The critical and commercial success of his first novel allowed Payne to write full time.[2]

Set on the North Carolina Outer Banks, Payne's second novel, Early from the Dance was published by Doubleday in 1989 and was again a Literary Guild selection. Reviewing for The Boston Globe, critic Richard Dyer called Payne, "a defining voice for this generation... Reading stretches of Early From the Dance is like attending a play in which every line is a curtain line. Payne has the deepest human sympathy for his characters and knowledge of the heart; everyone in this book comes alive."

Payne's third novel, Ruin Creek—set on the Outer Banks and in the fictional NC town of Killdeer—was published by Doubleday in 1993. The New York Times Book Review called Ruin Creek, "a powerful, lyrical novel that is a joy to read",[3] and in The Dallas Morning News, Professor Sharnhorst of the U. of New Mexico, wrote: "I begin with what may seem a bold observation: David Payne is the most gifted American novelist of his generation. Not to put too fine a point on it, Ruin Creek is the best new novel I've read this year. As in "Early from the Dance," he sets his literary table on the Carolina Outer Banks, a literary territory as palpable in these pages as Tobacco Road in Erskine Caldwell's works or the Salinas Valley in John Steinbeck's."[4]

In Payne's fourth novel, Gravesend Light, (Doubleday, 2000), Joey Madden—11-year-old narrator of Ruin Creek—has become Joe, an adult ethnographer, studying the lives of commercial fishermen in a traditional fishing community on the Outer Banks threatened with modernization. Reviewing for The Christian Science Monitor, Ron Charles wrote:

"... the grains of this plot eventually gain an irresistible momentum till it begins to move like an avalanche, crashing toward a spectacular natural disaster and a moral calamity. Joe's search for the magnetic field that orients people's lives and shapes their thoughts and actions finally takes him deep into that first, final, and most harrowing subject: himself. The novel reaches its climax in an explosively told disaster at sea that makes it clear there are no perfect storms. Payne is a rough, but trustworthy captain, and this is a story that rolls and pitches through all the moral waves of modern life."[5]

Payne's fifth novel, Back to Wando Passo (William Morrow, 2006), is set on a former rice plantation in South Carolina, where the discovery of a black iron pot—buried upside down in an anthill and wrapped with chains— initiates a series of mysterious events, opening a time portal to a second plot set during the Civil War. Of the novel, author Pat Conroy wrote, "Back to Wando Passo quivers with authentic life and is so bold in concept and audacious in scope that it seems like the summing up and exclamation point of a great writer's career." Kirkus Reviews wrote, "Payne's plot is a fine twisty marvel, but what ultimately sells this epic is his outsized passion."

In his sixth, most recent book, Barefoot to Avalon (Grove, 2015), Payne turned from fiction to memoir. The story centers on the death of Payne's younger brother, George A. Payne, detailing the last eight days of his life as he helped Payne pack up his Vermont house prior to returning to North Carolina. On the drive south, caravanning in two vehicles, Payne watched in the rearview mirror as his brother jackknifed, overturned and ultimately died on the shoulder of the highway. The New York Times called Barefoot to Avalon, "a brave book with beautiful sentences on every page", an appraisal seconded by The Los Angeles Times, which called Payne's memoir "a tour de force". In 2016, Charlie Rose interviewed Payne on The Charlie Rose Show, where he described Barefoot to Avalon as "powerful" and "searing".[6]