In the new novel “Far From Uncertain,” 90-year-old Margaret Kenyon is the oldest practicing registered nurse in the Texas Panhandle in the year 2000. The local newspaper in her hometown of Amarillo thinks her story would make a good Sunday feature. They send Charles Bailey to interview Margaret.
When he arrives, Margaret sets some conditions on the interview. Charles will get the information he needs about her career as a nurse, but only if he agrees to listen to her story about Frankie. Margaret knew Frankie in the past and has been waiting 75 years to tell Frankie’s story . Furthermore, Charles has to promise not to tell anyone any of what she talks about until she’s finished telling the story.
She explains that people will find the recollections of an old nurse boring but that Frankie’s story is important. It needs to be told by Margaret and understood by others.
New at His Job
Charles is fairly new at his job. His deadline for the feature about Margaret is in four days. He’s a good feature writer. His editor uses Charles’s ability to get beneath the surface and “touch readers with glimpses into real lives.”
Going into the interview, he wonders whether the elderly nurse will remind him of his implacable grandmother. As soon as he meets Margaret, he realizes he hasn’t been sent to interview a stuffy old woman. He’s interviewing Scheherazade, the legendary storyteller of “One Thousand and One Nights.” He agrees to her conditions, although he realizes he’ll have to ask for a deadline extension.
With that, Margaret starts her story. It begins in 1925, at the Fourth of July carnival near the East Texas town of Uncertain, where 15-year-old Frankie grew up on a farm. Tired of living with her violent, drunken father and her abusive brothers, she runs away with a man she meets at the carnival: Theophile Narcisse Bergeron.
Bergeron, or Dix as he prefers to be called, is 10 years her senior, a gambler, and a bootlegger. Originally from Louisiana, he’s a wanderer, set on making a living without working too hard. He counts on his luck and Gallic charm for success. Handsome, he projects a chivalrous image.
Past and Present
After this introduction, the novel switches between Frankie’s past in the 1920s and ’30s and the present time of Charles interviewing Margaret in 2000. As the novel progresses, it reveals layers within the book’s primary characters, often deeply buried, namely their secret dreams and shames. This is as true for Charles and Margaret as it is for Frankie and Dix.
The sections about Frankie take readers through the roller-coaster years of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the Dust Bowl in Texas and Oklahoma. It’s a world of hardscrabble farmers, oilfield workers, and oilfield boomtowns—places like Borger, Kilgore, and Lawton. It also follows the grifters who profit off the oilfields’ fast money. While Dix’s luck holds, the good times roll. When it fails, things turn sour, especially for Frankie.
The 2000 sections explore themes complementary to the action of 70 years earlier. The conversations between Charles and Margaret reveal the limitations imposed by age, the ambitions of youth, and how to realistically manage both.
Charles learns as much about himself as about Margaret through their talks. He follows her to the different jobs she continues doing even at 90. She’s a patient advocate at an assisted living home, and she spends time holding babies at a neonatal unit. This is work done for personal fulfillment.
Past and present blend together to address the book’s themes. What makes someone good or bad? Can good people make bad choices? What do they do once they realize the harm those choices cause?
A Life Well Lived
This novel explores what constitutes a life well lived, a life which leaves the world better off, as well as the person living it.
As Margaret reveals Frankie’s story, she prods Charles to consider the reasons behind Frankie’s choices and background. At one point, after describing something particularly egregious that Frankie did, Margaret asks Charles if he has any regrets, if he’s made any mistakes, and if he’s learned from them.
She then has Charles assess Frankie’s actions in light of his own failings. This leads him to reassess his own goals and the direction he wants to take in his own life.
One of the book’s charms is watching the bonding between the young man and elderly woman as they become friends. Margaret becomes an elder mentor for Charles, partly filling the role his late grandmother played.
“Far From Uncertain” is filled with uncertainties as it explores the ambiguities in determining the right course of action under difficult circumstances. Readers should be warned that there are some graphic passages describing abuse and violence. Nevertheless, it’s also a book with a strong moral core.
The best choice under the circumstances may just be the least–wrong decision. Even then, there’s a fixed right choice, one which should be the ultimate destination.
’Far From Uncertain: One Woman’s Life of Crime and Other Righteous Deeds’
By Teddy Jones
Stoney Creek Publishing Group: April 6, 2026
Paperback, 312 pages
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