`BECAUSE OF YOU' IS LIKE SITTING IN ON A LONG THERAPY SESSION

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 2, 1992                   TAG: 9202020243
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: F-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by JOAN SCHROEDER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
`BECAUSE OF YOU' IS LIKE SITTING IN ON A LONG THERAPY SESSION
BECAUSE OF YOU. By Lisa Walker. Viking. $18.95.
Lisa Walker's first novel is a skittish book, a stream-of-consciousness trip back in time with a nervous narrator bearing the heavily symbolic appellation Misty Groves.
Left on her grandparents' doorstep by her too-young parents, Misty recalls her early childhood in the sleepy town of Thelma. Recreation takes the form of car-watching and storytelling and Southern Baptist fundamentalism. And Misty wonders why it's taking her parents so many years to get settled, especially when her younger sister, Angie, fits neatly into their lives from the start.
At her grandfather's knee, Misty learns that the world is an evil place, filled with gypsies, charlatans and people like Ed Gein. "Ed Gein made women trust him by letting them think he was a fool or a mama's boy. He would lure girls up to his house by asking them to cook dinner for him, and he'd cook them for dinner instead. . . . The truth is, it's not safe anywhere. Not anywhere on this Earth," he says.
After five years, Misty's parents reclaim her, and she experiences firsthand the truth of her grandfather's words. But it isn't a murderer who threatens her; it's her parents, whose chronic fighting is punctuated by long periods of absence. Misty spends her childhood waiting for their return. "I felt responsible for Angie. I felt responsible for my mom and dad. I believed if I wasn't there my mom and dad would kill each other and Angie would disappear," Misty says.
Permanence eludes her in her friendships and sexual encounters, the details of which form the bulk of her narrative. Girlfriends marry young and disastrously; boyfriends are unfaithful, or die in car wrecks or in bad drug deals. What is it about her, she wonders, that makes everything turn to ashes under her touch? Presenting an answer to that question seems difficult for the author. Her narrative wanders and backtracks and intimates and then, in the final pages, hits you over the head with a club.
"Because of You" has an occasional freshness about it; Walker provides some quirky and startling anecdotes to keep her readers wading through her pensive considerations. But on the whole, reading Walker's narrative is like sitting in on a very long therapy session, watching someone approach the truth and then walk away from it repeatedly. Misty's revelations come painfully slow and with not much surprise.
Writing about parent-child tension in a coming-of-age novel isn't easy to do - it's been done so often, so well - especially using a narrator who hasn't the benefit of mature hindsight. "Because of You" may falter less because the story isn't worth telling than because it's told too artlessly.

Joan Schroeder is a Roanoke writer.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB