Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 12, 1992 TAG: 9201120249
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by DABNEY STUART
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
`HUG DANCING' SURPASSES OTHER WORKS BY HEARON
HUG DANCING. By Shelby Hearon. Knopf. $20.Shelby Hearon's 12th novel shows a master at work.
"Hug Dancing" is as deft an interweaving of story lines and character interaction, of theme and circumstantial detail, of humor and philosophical speculation, as we have in our current fiction.
Cile (for Celia) Tait is the wife of Eben, a Presbyterian minister in Waco, Texas, and mother of two middle-school girls. She also has been a sort of colleague for her husband since their marriage, supporting him with an invaluable verbal intelligence and scriptural knowledge in the preparation of his sermons. All this, however, unravels when Drew Williams, the high-school sweetheart from whom she had been separated abruptly more than 20 years earlier,returns to the center of her life.
That not only ends her marriage but also introduces surprising disruptions and revelations to the lives of the two principal families.
It's hard not to spoil the unexpected turns of "Hug Dancing." One of the major accomplishments of the novel, characteristic of Hearon's career in general, is the embedding in the fabric of the narrator's character a simultaneous concern with matters as powerful as fate and free will and a sense of the naturalness of such preoccupations.
It's as if John Calvin had found an advocate who can smile. Old-line Presbyterianism with a sense of humor - who ever heard of such a thing?
We have it here, not just what a preacher and his wife talk about as part of his weekly work has no sense of humor), but as something that generates the events in which the characters are embroiled.
Cile's best friend, Lila Beth Williams - whom one might call a "pillar of the congregation," and the mother, to boot, of Cile's lover - makes a superhuman effort to preempt the repetition of former terrible occurrences. It's not clear whether she succeeds or not, although on the surface it seems she does, preventing the recurrence of an earlier tragedy whose elements are all active again in the novel's present. The entire experience evokes the essence of Greek tragedy, lightened.
Thematically, the novel is a wonderful package of primary human concerns rendered with depth and good will. The characters are absorbing as well, touched with familiar strokes yet sharply individualized. Cile's two daughters and Andrew's sons are twined into the growth that characterizes the book as a whole.
Complex emotions and occurrences that bedevil the best of folks coexist with barbecue, jukeboxes, Mexican festivals and what to wear to social extravaganzas in contempory Waco. In fact, one of the book's special dimensions is Hearon's use of media. In the background of some scenes and woven into the substance of others, are sounds from radio, stereo and television.
One of the brilliant strokes of the book is the exclusion, after we have become accustomed to hearing such enhancement, of any sounds but voices in the resolving conversation between Cile and Lila Beth near the end of the novel. An appropriate focus occurs, unimpeded by the distractions of the frazzled world around them.
Shelby Hearon has been writing extraordinary books set in the social milieus of the Southwest for years - "A Small Town" (1985) and, more recently, "Owning Jolene" come to mind. She has won prestigious prizes for this work; yet despite the quality of her past books, "Hug Dancing" surpasses them in balance, grace and acceptance.
Dabney Stuart teaches at Washington & Lee University.