Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 1, 1993 TAG: 9308010201
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by JOAN SCHROEDER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In her fourth novel, North Carolina novelist Kaye Gibbons once again presents us with plucky female characters, deftly set in a time and a place. And once again, she chooses to tell her story through a first-person narrator, in whom Gibbons is so totally immersed that she herself becomes transparent, allowing her character center stage and full voice.
"Charms For an Easy Life" tells the story of three generations of women. There's Margaret, the narrator, and her beautiful mother, Sophia, both of whom stand in awe of Charlie Kate, the matriarch, whose practice of folk medicine makes her infamous throughout their corner of North Carolina.
When Charlie Kate's business is slow, she drums up patients among the "living dead" at the City News and Candy. She treats colicky babies and lepers, boil-infested hermits and World War II amputees, and granddaughter Margaret grows up decorating Christmas cookies with hypodermic needles.
Margaret also grows up without men, her philandering father dying an early, sudden and mysterious death. And when Charlie Kate's deserter husband dies, she's just as glad, set free to practice her peculiar brand of medicine and folklore:
"My mother asked her what she planned to do with herself now that she was officially a widow. She had asked the question in a lighthearted, teasing manner, but my grandmother didn't respond with the same spirit. She said, `What makes you think I'd want a man now? I'd take a poison pill before I'd take a man.' "
Men, in fact, play only walk-on parts in the novel, disappearing or dying or obligingly ineffectual enough to clear the stage for Charlie Kate and her female offspring, who live together for most of the story, presenting a united, progressive front to the world. It's a quirky life, around which men circle cautiously, with great caution.
Ironically, for all its exacting folk-medicine detail and World War II authenticity, "Charms For an Easy Life" has an oddly unrealistic feel to it.
Charlie Kate is too perfect a healer, too certain of the rightness of her life; her dreamily romantic daughter Sophia too fortunate to have a handsome divorce lawyer fall in love with her so smoothly; and Margaret too elegant in her response to her grandmother's death. The novel has a fairy-tale quality to it, a book in which the white hats and the black hats are too clearly and neatly separated.
None of this takes away from the sheer readability of this novel, pulled off by Gibbons' lovely perceptions, delicate prose, honest narration and fine storytelling instinct. After four novels so strongly marked with these virtues, Gibbons has clearly found her place in American letters - and seems destined to keep it for a good while.
If not her most straightforward or credible novel, "Charms For an Easy Life" is nonetheless a nicely executed and disarming book.
- Joan Schroeder has a story in the anthology `Life on the Line.'
by CNB