Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004290217
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by GEOFF SEAMANS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Blacksburg novelist Sharyn McCrumb's first five books were very, very good. This is better.
Like McCrumb's first five, "If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O" (it's a line from an Appalachian folk song) is a mystery but also something more.
The something more in the first five is the sharp eye and ear of the born satirist, however gently Southern their expression. The something more in McCrumb's sixth is all that - plus a haunting evocation of classic tragedy applied to a generation that, having survived the '60s, now is in the early throes of middle age.
McCrumb's satirical eye and ear are keen as ever, particularly in her descriptions of high-school life past and present. (Remember the "popular" kids, or the girls with the "raccoon eyes"?) Still keen, too, is McCrumb's sense of place, in this case a small mountain town in east Tennessee.
But in "Pretty Peggy-O," McCrumb has become less the satirist and scene-teller and more the straightforward storyteller. Her story echoes the Appalachian tale deftly woven into the narrative, yet resonates powerfully for readers not so well-acquainted as McCrumb with Appalachian culture.
That is so partly because the circumstances in which her characters find themselves are distillations of circumstances familiar to an entire generation of Americans.
Two veterans of Vietnam combat are, years later, still reacting to it in ways dissimilar but also alike. The protagonist, Sheriff Spencer Arrowood, didn't go to Vietnam but lives today under the psychological shadow of an older (and lesser) brother who died there. A contemporary high-school kid is fascinated by a war that ended about the time he was born. A one-time prom queen is, 20 years out of high school, a weary hostage to the Alzheimer's disease that has overcome her mother. A folk singer, her career in decline with the decline of her genre, has moved back to the country with thoughts of trying to recapture a bit of the old magic.
But there's a more universal resonance, too, that goes back not just 20 years but more than 2,000, to the ancient Greeks and their tragedies of what befalls prideful mortals when they tangle with webs sewn by the gods.
Behind McCrumb's story lies a mournful Appalachian folk tale, and behind that lie themes that have occupied humankind's self-consciousness for millenia.
by CNB