Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 1, 1990 TAG: 9004010250
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by JOAN SCHROEDER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Lee Smith's complete and unabashed love for her characters is what marks her second collection of short stories. And it's impossible to read these stories without sharing that admiration.
Smith loves these New-South housewives, laborers and store clerks so much that she allows them to tell their own tales in their own distinctive voices, at once all-knowing and doubtful, heavily anecdotal, often unsentimentally elegiac.
Most of the nine stories deal with loss and the inevitable life shifts that come in the wake of those losses. In these tales husbands come and go with great frequency; their wives stay behind to patch together the shards of lives shattered by anger, desertion or death. In "Bob, A Dog" husband David deserts wife Cheryl for a "frizzy-headed math teacher at the community college who didn't even wear any makeup or shave her legs."
Left with a house full of children, her husband's typed-up vacation itinerary and an escape-artist dog named Bob, Cheryl is 30 years old and, she tells us, unable to "imagine a different life."
But men notice Cheryl, and she does what she has to do, without agonizing and lengthy deliberation. Like her dog Bob, Cheryl is a survivor who, one suspects, will do just fine as a free agent in life: "Cheryl leaned back in her chair and opened the third California Cooler and laughed out loud finally as Bob scraped out and shook himself off and lurched over to stand for a minute there by her chair before he took off running free across the darkened yards, beneath the yellow moon."
Things seem to happen to Smith's characters with a certain inevitability, situations about which the reader wants desperately to warn the characters but, of course, cannot. In "Mon," Gloria's rotten-to-the-core son Buddy has escaped from a group home. She sits by the phone, waiting for his call for help, blaming everyone but herself and Buddy for her son's delinquency.
She remembers everything she's done for Buddy: the Reeboks and stone-washed jeans; expensive trips to the state fair; breaking up with her boyfriend for Buddy's happiness; excuses for his missing school; and, finally, his stealing and drug involvement. "He will always be my little boy, no matter how old he gets, no matter what he does," Gloria thinks. "He's a good boy. He will go to college, he will be a big shot, he will take such good care of his mother." Whether or not the phone rings, one suspects that Gloria is in just as much trouble as her son.
Occasionally Smith's anecdotal style gets her in trouble; several stories are distractingly digressive. In "Tongues of Fire," the longest story in the collection, the first-person narrator indulges herself by revealing every detail of her summer at camp, which is pretty standard fare. While anyone who went to camp in the '50s will no doubt smile knowingly at Smith's recollection, it's something of a red herring in a story already heavily packed with intent.
"Intensive Care," the penultimate story, reveals Lee Smith at her best. Beautiful Cherry Oxendine lies dying in the hospital, and second-husband Harold Stikes sits holding her hand, recalling with unashamed adoration their life together. The plot has all the elements of a soap opera: jilted spouses, genteel poverty, the fallen woman, cancer. But Smith elevates it all to a fully memorable story, peopled by truly noble human beings.
Like Bobbie Ann Mason, Lee Smith writes about common people living common lives in small towns whose faces are increasingly scarred by creeping suburbia. K marts and Food Lions and Safeways lure shoppers; they order take-out food from Bisquite Kitchen drive-thru; and find work at the Tanfastic tanning parlor. But Lee Smith seems to love her characters more than Mason does, and the narrative excesses resulting from that affection are by and large forgivable.
"Me and My Baby View the Eclipse" reveals a writer of great self-assurance, certain of the fit between her characters and their tales. Lee Smith's eye for detail and the significance of small happenings make her stories wonderfully accessible, never predictable and often lyrical. When readers close the collection, they may well recall Harold Stikes' reflection on Cherry Oxendine:
"He feels like he has been specially selected among men, to receive a precious gift. He stepped out of his average life for her, he gave up being a good man, but the rewards have been extraordinary. He's glad he did it. He'd do it all over again."
by CNB