Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 6, 1990 TAG: 9005060272
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by FRED CHAPPELL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
One of these days, Kelly Cherry's fiction, as well as her poetry, will be widely recognized for its impeccable handling of nuance, its sympathetic but analytic understanding of character, its innovative structures, its leavening of warm wit. And for other qualities as beautiful and as important as the ones I have mentioned.
It may take some time for this happy day to arrive.
Cherry labors under the cruel misfortune of being a good writer that few critics have the intellectual or emotional equipment needed to review her work justly. Her books are usually handed for review to dragonish professional feminists with lots of axes and teeth to grind, or to wimpish cocktail circuit aesthetes who seem never to have heard of a literature of ideas or to have read, for example, Benjamin Constant or Kate Chopin.
The trouble is not that Cherry's novels haven't been found by the audience they deserve, but that they haven't found the audience that's waiting for them. Sometimes one feels that her work would be especially welcome in England where authors like Beryl Bainbridge and Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark have found wide readership. Cherry is not as sardonic as this trio; her humor is less bitter and much more good-natured, but the talent for sidelong observation that it takes to write like these well-known British novelists she possesses in plentiful store.
The title of her brilliant new book, which she calls "a novel in stories," may have been a mistake. Some sloppy reviewers will manage to read these pages as an attack on "pop" psychology with lots of snide remarks about the ubiquitous talk show guest, Dr. Joyce Brothers. Then they will be disappointed, for "My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers" approves the easy wisdom of the television star, finding her, if innocuous, not pernicious in the savage way of the high-priced private analysts whom the heroine of the novel is forced to put up with. Enthusiastic fans of Brothers will find the novel lacking in adulation.
Then there is the subject matter of the book, which consists of just the kind of thing we expect to find exposed on a television show like "Donahue," where some person admits for the first time in public that he is a secret transvestite transsexual who infected his grandmother with AIDS. Nina, the plucky heroine of "My Life," is forced to deal with an incestuous episode, the dying of her parents by Alzheimer's disease and of her brother by alcoholism, with ugly divorce, with single parenting, with dark periods of deep depression.
Heavy stuff. Yet there is not a gloomy or morbid page in this book, though of course there are sad ones, the author being scrupulously honest and taking her book seriously. All is gracefulness and deftness and ease because there is not the least trace of self-pity to be found. After many trials, Nina wins through; she achieves something close to happiness, a measure of contentment, a degree of well-earned pride.
If there are any words that a reviewer can write to persuade readers to pick up and enjoy a book, please consider that I have said them here. For I believe that Kelly Cherry's "My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers" will bring every person of good will to agree with my estimate: that here is a volume of rare excellence.
by CNB