Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 4, 1990                   TAG: 9003042263
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: F-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by JOAN SCHROEDER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CURREY'S FICTION IS HONEST, ELGANT

The six stories and one novella in Richard Currey's collection are painstakingly told, grim considerations of hard lives in the West Virginia coalfields. The stories read like the inside of someone's head. Most of the events are remembered, recalled for the reader in lyrical prose that demands slow reading and close attention. It's worth the effort.

Currey's characters are fundamentally alone, operating in a set orbit that often excludes others. And that causes the people in his stories great pain. In the brief, appropriately named "Tyler's Ballad," a railroad engineer's wife kills herself in the woodshed on his 41st birthday. He is unable to comprehend her gut-felt loneliness, and finds solace only in his train, "a friend."

Often the isolation of his characters is imposed by the harshness of their environment. In several stories it is the coal mining that tears bonds apart, leaving wounds that never heal. "Believer's Flood" is a first-person narrative, told by an old miner, Raymond Dance, sucking oxygen through a tube. Currey's description of the miner's black lung is agonizing:

"Got my lips pursed, rounded, that's the way I was taught by the doctors up at the university, lean forward on my knees they told me, make like I'm about to whistle and let that air come short and sweet, do the least work possible keeping it there, go on and let it push itself."

The title story, perhaps the strongest in the collection, shares the last hours of Rockwell Lee Junior, petty-thief-turned-murderer. Holed up in a church, he recalls his history and shares with the reader his downfall. Here is just part of the long, wonderful first paragraph: "Listen. Hear me talking to you. Rockwell Lee Junior remembering the glow in your kitchen, Mama, the light that was a mix of gold and blue on a winter's night and the way our talk drifted around like big slow birds in the warm air and Oh what I wouldn't give for one more day in the sweetness of what I didn't know back then . . . "

By the story's end, Rockwell Lee writes his own eulogy. He says, "We are gone, we are history. We are stories nobody tells." Thankfully, Richard Currey "The Wars of Heaven" is a fine book.