Larry Baker Takes Us Deep Into Florida

Author and former literature professor, Larry Baker, visits with us to talk about his newest novel,Wyman and the Florida Knights. The book tells the story of Peter Wyman, a famous American portrait painter, who is nearing the end of his life and wants to escape his past by seeking a place of refuge. “He’s told that the only place you can go and disappear is this little town in Florida called Knightville, and so once he gets there…you’ve got 1866 to 2016, 150 years of history in the first half of the book and the second half of the book is one year. All of that history starts bouncing off of each other.” When describing his protagonist, Baker said, “The thing I like about Wyman… is that it’s very original. I don’t know too many of those characters. I understand the psychology of Peter Wyman, the artist, the…megalomaniac, ego-driven, ‘I’m the artist, I create reality.’ I understand that because, hey, there’s a version of that in me.” As for the heroine, “Angel Darling is one of my favorite female characters and she’s a stripper/swinger in Florida who used to be a nurse…She’s the person that really makes a difference in everybody’s life at the end.”

The idea for this book came from Baker’s fascination with the concept of God and his questions of faith. He explained, “For this book, literally, I wanted to tell a Bible story. I wanted to retell a Bible story, and the story I picked was Cain and Abel. That was the original thought, ‘I’m going to retell Cain and Abel in a modern setting.’ It’s been done before in other writers but, my version. I couldn’t have brothers but I wanted to create…a version of the Garden of Eden and that’s Florida in the 1800’s…instead of having brothers, well, let’s make them cousins…rich and poor but they both fall in love with the same woman, but she marries the poor cousin. Now, when you hear Cain and Abel, you know…there’s gonna be some murder involved, but it’s not the murder from the Bible, it’s a different murder that one of the cousin’s commits…out of that comes all the other characters.”

Something that fans may have noticed from reading Baker’s novels is his frequent use of Florida as the setting of his stories. He remarked, “Florida is a lot more interesting than most other states. One, it’s not like other states. It’s not really southern. It’s the environment that makes Florida different. Florida used to be totally unlike every other state in America. It was a jungle; it had wildlife like no other place. So old Florida is almost mythic, and it creates these mythical situations… but it has these really weird characters in it and that appeals to me and so I keep writing about it.”