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

Two young drop-outs cross paths in a small Arkansas town in Trenton Lee Stewart's compelling debut novel, Flood Summer (Southern Methodist University Press, $24.95). Abe has recently lost his college scholarship, returning to his hometown to work long, mindless hours as a roofer. Marie dropped out as a child, staying on the run with her druggie mother. But after Marie moves in with her bookstore-owning father and meets Abe, things look promising -- until her personal demons come out of early retirement.

What makes this offbeat novel so appealing is how well it conveys the awkwardness of a young man and woman coming of age in those furtive years between high school and full-blown adulthood. Abe and Marie, both intelligent but without direction from a career, college or vocation, are struggling with relationships, which they both desperately need to move forward.

Abe is cut off from everyone, including his best friend after a harrowing experience involving his friend's mother. Early in the novel, while driving across a flooded bridge, Abe and his pickup truck are swept over the side. He emerges downstream only to find his friend's mother, half alive, pinned by her car against a tree. Unable to rescue her, later he is unable to confess to his friend what happened in those final traumatic moments.

Just when you might think every southern novel needs to have a sassy heroine with a closet full of eccentric relatives, here's one without any tricks up its sleeves -- just gritty, heartfelt writing. Stewart, an Arkansas native who now lives in Cincinnati, has published fiction in "The Georgia Review" and other literary journals.

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Leah Stewart's The Myth of You and Me (Shaye Areheart Books, $21.95) smoothly probes a childhood friendship between two women that thrives through college, then ends abruptly. Now nearing the age of 30, Cameron hasn't talked to her ex-best friend since she deliberately stranded her at a remote gas station almost eight years ago.

Sure, the circumstances around their attempted reunion are a trifling cooked up. After the death of Cameron's boss, a 90-something southern historian with a flair for drama, he leaves her one last mission: hand-deliver a wedding present to her ex-friend Sonia.

As Cameron dutifully travels to the Northeast to carry out her assignment, she encounters several mysteries -- Sonia has seemingly disappeared. And Cameron just happens to bump into a former hometown heart throb, who may know more than he's letting on about Sonia's personal life. It's another timely coincidence, but Stewart's well-honed writing makes it all seem plausible and somewhat touching. Stewart, who lives near Chapel Hill, is also the author of Body of a Girl.

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Health professionals struggling with their emotions and immigrants struggling with made-in-the-USA values take center stage in Doris Iarovici's powerful collection of short stories, American Dreaming and Other Stories (Novello Festival Press, $21.95). In the title story, we find a Thai mother, a hard-working house cleaner, who worries about her carefree teenage daughter, who isn't quite as carefree as she pretends to be.

In "Practical," a Romanian medical student marries an American to move to the U.S. and find better opportunities. Much to her husband's chagrin, instead of being satisfied with their domestic life, she wants to keeping moving upwards -- only with their daughter and a new medical practice a few states away from him.

In "Waiting for Power," an ice storm reunites a divorced couple who have been living separately. With the help of some Romanian neighbors also stranded by the storm, the ex-husband, a college professor suffering from acute hipness, preaches the possibility of transformation. His ex-wife is tempted, but in the end, wisely doesn't take the bait. If the American dream is all about transformation and freedom to pursue pleasure, Iarovici's stories are an eloquent testimony to what happens when one wakes up from the dream and starts dealing with reality.

Iarovici, who arrived from Romania at the age of 5, now lives in Durham, N.C., and practices psychiatry at Duke University.

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'Tis the season to sit quietly by the fire and block out irrational exuberance with the help of A Dixie Christmas (Algonquin Books, $15.95), holiday stories from the South's best writers. If you believe, as Fred Chappell notes in the preface, that it may be perfectly normal to think "that Christmas is a thing too good for us, that we are adequate for everyday usages but lack the full measure of character that joy demands," then these stories are for you. They range across the spectrum of holiday experiences: from a child's eye view of parents exchanging mysterious gifts (Marianne Gingher), to an adolescent's musings on his confounding seventh grade teacher (George Singleton), to a little parable on midlife malaise (Bailey White). The writing is as dry as aged Scotch -- bundle the collection and a bottle together to make a perfect gift for that special holiday curmudgeon on your list.

An edited version of these reviews appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, December 25, 2005.

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