Book Review:

WHEN THE FINCH RISES
Jack Riggs
Ballantine Books, $23.95

review by Hal Jacobs
for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In the summer of 1968, your typical, red-blooded American boy wanted two things: to own a GI Joe action figure and to see daredevil Evel Knievel soar on his motorcycle over 20 Greyhound buses. Never mind the family break-up, Vietnam body counts, political assassinations and rioting in the streets. With the help of GI Joe and Evel Knievel, the world seemed more manageable somehow. More hopeful.

Twelve-year-old Raybert, the sensitive narrator of Riggs' debut novel, needs all the help he can get. He wishes that his family resembled the beaming people on The Ed Sullivan Show, but they are more like the jugglers' plates that are spinning atop poles and wobbling like crazy.

Raybert's family lives in a small North Carolina mill town, a place rooted in the southern mire of poverty, racism and violence. His mother suffers from mental illness; the family says she is once again "chasing her tail" when she starts obsessing over Bobby Kennedy, dressing too provocatively or suspecting her husband of various infidelities.

The boy's father disappears frequently and returns bloody and torn up from fighting other men in the alley behind his dry cleaning building. He's a shadowy figure, tortured by his own demons and his wife's illness. And when Raybert eyes him in a snapshot taken at the lynching of a black man, the boy can never see him again without feeling ripped apart. He stashes the photo in his bedroom, where it continues to haunt him.

Hidden in my chest of drawers was evidence so incriminating, so disgusting that for the longest time when I looked at Daddy, I could not help but feel hate for the man I could not stop loving.

Raybert forms a close friendship with a wayward, pint-size classmate named Palmer, who spends much of his time living in the crawlspace under his house. His seedy home life and abusive mother make Raybert's life seem almost genteel in comparison.

But Palmer isn't cast as a victim. He's a dashing, modern-day Huck Finn, someone who knows the dark side of life and rejects it by developing a stronger conscience than anyone around him. Fittingly, Palmer bears a birthmark ("a fiery halo on top of his skull") that marks him out as someone special.

Palmer has a dream that Raybert soon shares. The two boys will escape to Myrtle Beach in a 1965 Pontiac Catalina once owned by Palmer's father. There they will live happily ever after. As the adults in their lives begin to spin more out of control, they cling tighter to each other and their dream. Surely, if Evel Knievel can make it, they can, too.

Riggs, who teaches at Georgia Perimeter College, conjures up the mysteries of a mill town summer, vividly depicting the lights and shadows of ordinary events and horrors. The only bumps in the novel occur when national tragedies -- the assassination of the Kennedy's and Martin Luther King, Jr. -- coincide too neatly with key moments in Raybert's life, making scenes feel a bit contrived (something better left to Hollywood scriptwriters). But this is a minor note in an otherwise deeply satisfying portrait of a troubled family.

An edited version of this review appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Friday, Oct. 17, 2003.

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