New Fiction by Regional Authors, September 2001 by Hal Jacobs for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In Michael Parker's Towns without Rivers (William Morrow, $25), Reka Speight and her younger brother, Randall, are both cursed and blessed. Cursed because they've grown up white-trash poor in rural North Carolina, their mother died young, their six brothers and sisters are mean as snakes and their daddy is killing himself with a bottle. Blessed because they have imagination -- and each other. The year is 1959. Having spent five years in prison for accidentally killing her rich lover, Reka is in her early 20s and will do anything to leave the hot, oppressive South behind. Her wish finally comes true when she joins a crew of young college girls traveling west to sell books for the summer. But Reka's escape from the South comes at a heavy cost -- she breaks a promise to take her brother with her. And by the time Randall discovers her whereabouts, she's already moved from Montana to Seattle. He hits the road to find her, but detours in Chicago when he enters an ill-fated relationship with a painter dazzled by his Raw Experience. As the novel cuts back and forth between Randall and Reka's separate quests for love and redemption, the brother and sister slowly lose touch. Ultimately, the novel is about this tenuous connection within families -- and its power to heal. Michael Parker, who received national recognition for his 1993 debut novel (Hello Down There), captures the mood of an all-night diner that draws people - and their tragic stories - from all walks of life. His writing is starkly poetic, as when Reka describes her father's hand as "bony and raw-skinned and unaccustomed to holding anything besides a hoe or a bottle." Or when Randall sits on the beach and reads a note from his sister, oblivious to his father drowning in the surf. Reka and Randall have the feel of archetypal Southern characters: They're both desperate to leave the South, then desperate to return and reclaim what they've lost. When we first meet the title character in Heather Sellers's Georgia Under Water (Sarabande Books, paper $13.95), 12-year-old Georgia lives with her family on the 23rd floor of a Daytona Beach condo named Pleasure Towers. Her life is a mess. Georgia adores her father, a drunk who returns her hugs with slaps. Meanwhile, her mother teeters on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and her hairy, younger brother plays his own survival games, like hanging off the outside of the balcony railing while the parents fight. Inside this emotionally charged world of violence and isolation - with a seaside view -- Georgia lurches towards womanhood with great passion. One day she's a wet lump: "my palms sweated, balls of juice came out of my armpits, and the soles of my feet felt sweet and squishy. Welp, I though, I'm a girl. Such is my lot." Another day her legs drop out of her body and become "long sleek noodles" that she can't pamper and admire enough. As the early stories in this collection follow the tortured Jackson family from beach condo to Orlando suburb in the mid-1970s, we see everything from Georgia's adolescent point of view. Later stories reveal what's ticking inside the hearts of her parents. Her father feels most alive while slumming in dark beach bars with his brothers. Her mother feels mostly dread at the thought of her overly luscious daughter entering a hostile world. At the end of the collection, we see Georgia walking alone down a central Florida highway. She's a long way from the ocean that once nourished her. Where she's headed is anyone's guess. Heather Sellers, a native of Florida who teaches English at Hope College in Michigan, illuminates the wild imagination of a young girl struggling to blossom in the ruins of her family's break-up. This collection of stories about a not-so-ordinary adolescence has a breathless rhythm that is every bit as revealing as it is disturbing.
An edited version of this appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, Sept. 30, 2001 |
