Reading the South
New Fiction by Regional Authors, April 2005
by Hal Jacobs
for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Once upon a time, before the invention of the printing press, illuminators decorated manuscript pages with colorful pictures and doodles, making dry parchment and text come to life with stunning visuals. Freelance illuminators moved around and worked on individual book projects much like today's freelancers - and with about the same level of health benefits.

Brenda Rickman Vantrease's historical novel, The Illuminator (St. Martin's Press, $24.95), follows the footsteps of such an artist in tumultuous, plague-ridden England of the late 1300s.

Finn is a busy fellow. When he's not illustrating sacred texts for the church, he's secretly decorating manuscripts written in English by John Wycliffe, the reformer who believed the Bible should be made available to everyone.

Against this background of church reform and political turmoil, Finn and his teenage daughter begin living under the roof of the widow Lady Kathryn. She is at her wit's end trying to keep her dower lands for her sons and away from predatory priests and local officials. Soon, the free-thinking artist and laced-up widow find themselves falling in love, which frees up their children for some quality play time of their own.

Thanks to Vantrease's literary skills, the luvvy duvvy stuff between Finn and Kathryn (and between his daughter and her son) is only a small, spicy part of a lush, fully detailed medieval world the author illuminates. Vantrease vividly depicts the day-to-day lives of characters from all walks of life-dwarves, serving girls, bishops and religious hermits. The historical details of the years leading up to the Reformation are rendered as cleanly as the kitchen details, such as when Finn spends an idle moment chatting with the cook, Agnes.

They were sitting at the chopping block, Finn coddling his tankard of perry as Agnes plucked a brace of geese for roasting on the turnspit. Cool winds from the North Sea chased the July heat that had collected in the room. Peat smoke from the perpetual fire on the stone hearth mixed with the smell of pottage in the great iron pot that Agnes kept continually simmering with beef bones, barley, and leeks. She always had a bowl of broth and an oatcake to offer a hungry villein or beggar, whoever came to her door.

As gifted as this novel is, perhaps even more remarkable is that it's the first novel of Vantrease, a 59-year-old librarian and former schoolteacher from Tennessee.

* * *

In Joshilyn Jackson's gods in Alabama (Warner Books, $19.95), a young southern woman has good reasons for not returning home to Alabama after 10 years of self-exile in Chicago.

First off, Arlene Fleet is deeply involved with a lawyer whose dark skin complexion is guaranteed to freak out her working-class Alabama family.

Secondly, she promised God she wouldn't return to Alabama as long as "He" never revealed her decade-old secret--the body of a high school quarterback whom she bashed over the head with a tequila bottle and left for dead in a clump of kudzu.

Of course, Arlene does go back home, with her loyal boyfriend along for the ride, to face her mostly hostile family and deep dark secret. And it's only a matter of time before she and her fiercely loving aunt lay their cards on the table.

As the hip, sassy narrator, Arlene will either leave you rolling on the floor, laughing at her half-crazy antics and raunchy past, or wonder what in the world her boyfriend sees in this totally self-absorbed young woman. It's not the sex, because she has sworn it off after sleeping with every high school sophomore boy in her high school (another promise between her and the Creator).

But there is something endearing about a young southern woman who wanders to a nearby Wal-Mart when she feels lonely and has imaginary conversations with people from home.

"I was standing in Ladies' Clothes with my imaginary aunt Florence. As I debated between a blue sweater and green one, Aunt Florence spoke up: "Honey, you want the blue. That green'll make you look bilious."

Jackson, a former actor and teacher, lives outside of Atlanta.

* * *

Sonny Brewer's The Poet of Tolstoy Park (Ballantine Books, $21.95) offers a sensitive portrait of Henry Stuart, a 67-year-old retired professor and widower from Idaho who moves to Fairhope, Ala., after his doctor diagnoses a terminal case of tuberculosis.

Set in 1925, Brewer depicts these major transitions in his character's life-both the acceptance of death and the adjustment to a new community-from the point of view of an academic who prefers big books and big ideas over big human drama. From that perspective, it makes sense that this southern adventure reads more like a series of personal essays than a hot-blooded work of fiction.

Brewer is editor of the "Blue Café" anthology series and owner of Over the Transom Bookstore in Fairhope, Ala.

An edited version of these reviews appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, April 10, 2005.

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