THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 18, 1994 TAG: 9412140403
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
SOLITARY PLACES
JOAN VANNORSDALL SCHROEDER
G.P. Putnam's Sons. 287 pp. $22.95.
MUCH OF THE VISION in Solitary Places comes from beyond the grave.
In her daring first novel, Joan Vannorsdall Schroeder gives us the unusual perspective of Lucy McComb, a dead spinster schoolteacher who sees all from the cemetery. It is her voice that moves the book. It is her thoughts we crave.
``Much of what I know about the living I learned from my front porch, that shadowy threshold carefully placed between the controllable order of home and the messiness of the world outside,'' Lucy says.
Schroeder, who lives in Roanoke, hooks us instantly. She has attempted something risky and rare. She has examined the ties of the living to the dead and revealed how those states overlap and erode one another. Schroeder teaches us the depths of love and pain.
``Real love obligates us to live a brave and daring life,'' Lucy says. ``It is a fire that at its hottest burns away all fear and inhibition and leaves us open to do in our hearts what we most desire.''
Lucy's is the voice we hear after the final page is turned. She whispers to us of her illicit lover and tells us how she felt on the day she died. It is her words that haunt us: ``No one ever wants to let go of life. In the deepest curves of the heart, hope and desire linger.''
She makes us think.
Lucy's wisdom comes interspersed with the voices of other Collier, Va., townsfolk, some of whom fight against the local landfill polluting their lives with garbage belonging to their northern neighbors.
We come to know the characters through their own thoughts and actions, with added perspective from Lucy. As in life, storybook lives mutate along the way. Nothing is quite as it seems. A man so handsome and desirable when young falls victim to Alzheimer's disease. The woman who won his favor and became his wife is scarcely a winner:
``I had a husband who was skidding away from me at crazy angles, leaving me increasingly alone with these problems,'' says Sarah Rose McComb. ``I missed Hunter more than words could say. I believed fiercely that I deserved the luxury of them, and let the tears come.''
There are flashes of pure talent in Schroeder's novel, but she doesn't sustain the momentum. Her writing is uneven. The metaphors and the environmental theme are worn in places.
Schroeder knows the landfill turf from experience. She's an activist who worked to close the Kim-Stan landfill in Allegheny County in 1990. Although it was shut down, its legacy lives on.
As Lucy tells us, the landfill may smooth over and grass may grow again. People may forget, but the Earth cannot.
``What is left behind?'' Lucy asks. ``Millions of tons of throw-away lives, pieces that don't seem to matter separately but that come together now on my land to take on new life. Some of it will return to the air, and some to the earth, wells of methane waiting for fiery transformation. . . . The altered water pours, pools, goes on. We cannot contain it, like sin, it will be with us forever.''
Schroeder has a good first effort in Solitary Places. She has created characters with substance - characters who grow and change. She reminds us of just how fragile the Earth is and encourages us to live and die with passion. MEMO: June Arney is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Joan Vannorsdall Schroeder
by CNB