New Fiction by Regional Authors, April 2001 by Hal Jacobs for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Rides of the Midway. By Lee Durkee, W.W. Norton & Company, $25.95. It's the 1970s, and freaky things keep happening to Noel Weatherspoon. On the same day that he knocks a kid into a coma during a baseball game, he heals his aunt's beagle by laying on hands. On the same night that Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane crashes near Noel's town of Hattiesburg, Miss., he sees his daddy's ghost in a drive-in movie restroom. Like that octopus-style ride on the midway, Durkee's debut novel spins one way, then another, in a crazy tangle of lies, laughs, drugs, porn and violence. Noel is the long-haired drug dealer who wraps mystery around him like an old Army blanket. Did he really sneak into that comatose boy's hospital room and unplug his life support? Is Noel (aka "Moon Man") always wasted because he always feels guilty? Or is he always wasted because it's the dazed-and-confused '70s, when going blotto seemed like a valid form of either self-expression or self-defense? Lee Durkee grew up in Mississippi and has published short fiction in Harper's and elsewhere. Despite a few bumps in the story, "Rides of the Midway" offers an appealing '70s hero who remains strangely innocent despite his drug-abusing, hell-raising ways. FIRST LOOK: Two more years passed and still nobody had been arrested for the murder of Ross Altman. Everyone in town seemed to have forgotten about the incident except Noel, who saw himself perpetually through the lens of that murder. When he shaved, he was a murderer shaving. When he stared at his hands, they were the hands of a murderer. In this light, every good thing that happened to him seemed but a reprieve. Ella in Bloom. By Shelby Hearon, Alfred A. Knopf, $23. Ella, a single mom in her early 40s, lives in a run-down duplex in Old Metairie, a suburb outside of New Orleans. Though she barely makes ends meet as a part-time plant sitter, she can count her blessings: Her daughter is musically gifted, and Ella has mercifully escaped the clutches of her own genteel, disapproving mother back in Texas. All that changes, however, when Ella's older sister ("the blond, beautiful, perfect daughter") dies in the wreckage of her chartered Piper Cherokee. Now Ella (the "wayward, willful" one) must step out of her sister's shadow and face mommy dearest alone. Slowly Ella blooms, but not without a few sticky encounters. Should she tell her brother-in-law that her sister was flying to a rendezvous with her lover when she crashed? Or reveal that her feelings for him go back to high-school days? And what about the secret life her mother has hidden from her? Shelby Hearon, author of the award-winning "Owning Jolene" and 14 other novels, was born in Marion, Ky., and now makes her home in Burlington, Vt. FIRST LOOK: Buddy, my sometime husband, got it in his mind that my folks thought he was no good because he got me to run off, but the truth more likely was that I ran off with him because my folks thought he was no good. At any rate, I owed him forever for getting me out of their house, away from Texas, on my own two feet. Spikes. By Michael Griffith, Arcade Publishing, $24.95. "Golf is madness." Brian Schwan isn't sinking putts; he's sinking himself in this sharp, acerbic novel about a golf pro who comes down with a sudden case of the "bad crazies." On the first day of the Snapper/Gold Club Tour, Schwan has problems on and off the course. He shoots a pathetic 77, then pretends to be his sensational, 59-shooting rival to impress a jiggly tele-journalist. It works. They make plans for a big night out in Charleston. And why shouldn't he betray his marriage, fellow golfers and TV evening news viewers? Golf has betrayed him. Since the age of 9, under his father's thumb, Schwan has given his life to golf. He filled the garage with trophies for his father to polish. During his years at the University of Georgia, he coasted towards the professional ranks. He also met his future, Bible-toting wife at an Athens-area barbeque joint. But since the honeymoon and the ensuring four years on the pro circuit, all he's really earned is the nickname of "Clutch." Michael Griffith, who grew up in Orangeburg, S.C., is an editor at The Southern Review. His debut novel - with its cosmic ramblings and bitter, alienated hero - poses an interesting question: How good can you be without love, certainty, faith or joy? As for the secret of golf, well, it's just a game. FIRST LOOK: It's one thing to admire a man's skill, to appreciate a feathery touch around the greens, the ability to drop the hammer on the teeball, the guts to rap downhill eight-footers with authority; but there's nothing - nothing - more dispiriting to me than seeing blind faith rewarded. I hate it, hate it, hate it. The Florabama Ladies' Auxiliary. By Lois Battle, Viking, $24.95. Florabama is a long way from Buckhead. Especially for Bonnie Duke Cullman, a Buckhead homemaker and stay-at-home mom. When she gets downsized from her broken marriage and empty-nester's home, she drives her Volvo south for the only job she can find. Ironically enough, she's the new coordinator for displaced homemakers in Florabama, Ala. Not pampered homemakers like her, but laid-off mill workers. Women like big-haired, hard-drinking Hilly Pruitt, who knows that "life is like a dogsled: If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes." Over the next few months, the scenery does change for Bonnie and Hilly - thanks partly to a couple of alpha males who appear at base camp. As Bonnie discovers the hassles of being a wage slave in a small southern town, she also makes a difference in the lives of the former lace cutters. Lois Battle, who has written seven other novels and lives in Beaufort, S.C., finds the little details that flesh out this novel about love in the age of menopause. FIRST LOOK: Her new red Saturn had a bumper sticker with DON'T TREAD ON ME and LIVE FREE OR DIE printed on a background of a coiled snack and a Confederate flag. She unlocked the door, slid in, punched on the air conditioning, and sat, breathing deeply. Nothing as good as the smell of a new car. It was damn near aphrodisiac. On Bear Mountain. By Deborah Smith, Little, Brown and Company, $24.95. From the day it arrives, the Iron Bear looms over everyone in Tiberville, a small town in the North Georgia mountains. Most people hate the welded heap of scrap iron. But not Ursula's daddy, who eventually saves the modern-art piece from destruction and installs it in his own pasture. And certainly not Quentin's daddy, the Brooklyn sculptor who now has the confidence to create other works of art. Twenty-two years later, the Iron Bear casts a different kind of shadow. Ursula, an Emory grad and small-press publisher, is struggling to hang onto her daddy's farm and care for her autistic, bear-worshipping brother. Her luck changes, not so unexpectedly, when Quentin drives up one day and wants to write her a million-dollar check for his father's first masterpiece. What happens when these two strong, determined people - who, by the way, look like Julia Roberts and Richard Gere - want the same thing? Passion, that's what. Passion as hot as an iron bear on a summer day. Author Deborah Smith knows whereof she writes. She is a sixth-generation Georgia native, former newspaper reporter and amateur folk artist who lives in the north Georgia mountains. FIRST LOOK: The Tibers and their friends nurtured desperately hopeful pretty-postcard visions of classic statuary that could pose grandly on Mountain State's manicured lawns. Or, at the very least, a piece of modern art that would not embarrass old ladies and ministers. So when the door of the boxcar was pushed back, everyone crowded forward to see Tiberville's first piece of Yankee sculpture. They quickly backed up. Home Across the Road. By Nancy Peacock, Bantam Books, $11.95. The black Redds live in a small frame house across the road from the Roseberry plantation home of the white Redds. What links the two families together, besides a 100-year-old history that includes slavery and domestic service, is a pair of abalone earrings. Ever since a slave child was taken from his parents because of the earrings, the jewelry has become a powerful talisman to the black Redds. The story, first published in 1996, moves back and forth over time, and uses the simple rhythms and repetitions of oral storytelling to create two honest family portraits. Nancy Peacock lives in Pittsboro, N.C. "Home Across the Road," her second novel, was a New York Times Notable Book. FIRST LOOK: At age fourteen China started working for the white Redds in the big old house called Roseberry. At age fourteen China Redd began a lifetime of mornings spent cracking eggs into a bowl and brewing coffee and spreading softened butter across bread that was toasted the color of her skin.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, April 8, 2001 |
