ALLISON'S 1ST NOVEL: VIOLENT, BIZARRE, TYPICAL

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

DATE: SUNDAY, January 10, 1993                   TAG: 9301100149
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: F-4   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: Reviewed by JOAN SCHROEDER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
ALLISON'S 1ST NOVEL: VIOLENT, BIZARRE, TYPICAL
BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA. By Dorothy Allison. Dutton. $20.
South Carolina native Dorothy Allison's "Bastard Out of Carolina" is, in some ways, quite typical of first novels. It is first-person and autobiographical, and it has an ax to grind. But the novel goes well beyond the standard in several important ways, revealing its author's scrupulous integrity and keen ear for language.
Narrator Bone Boatwright starts by telling the story of her violent birth: "Mama, eight months pregnant, was just asleep and everyone else was drunk. And what they did was plow headlong into a slow-moving car. The front of Uncle Travis' Chevy accordioned; the back flew up . . . and Mama, still asleep with her hands curled under her chin, flew right over their heads, through the windshield, and over the car they hit. . . . She didn't wake up for three days, not till after Granny and Aunt Ruth had signed all the papers and picked out my name."
Bone also started life with a big red "Illegitimate" stamped across the bottom of her birth certificate, a state-sactioned violence that pushes against her every way she turns. Despite her mother's frantic attempts to legitimize her daughter through marriage and confrontations with the clerk of court, Bone remains well outside the comforts of safety.
Comfort and safety aren't what the Boatwright family seeks, at least not in ways most of us understand. It's a huge network of big, free-ranging men and hard-working, worn-out women who make do. Allison manages brilliantly to make each of the aunts and uncles distinct and of special value to Bone, whose girlhood at home with mother Anney and stepfather Daddy Glen Waddell becomes increasingly nightmarish as the novel progresses.
In Glen Waddell, Dorothy Allison has created one of the most menacing yet pitiable characters in recent fiction. She does him just right, from his grotesque physicality to the horrible progression of his jealous abuse of his stepdaughter.
Seeking something beyond the silence and hunger of her household, Bone befriends Shannon Pearl, daughter of a gospel-music promoter and Christian bookstore owner. Shannon is an albino, a "strange and ugly child," and she shares with Bone the burning rage that comes form being an outcast. They make an odd couple, until Shannon burns to death at a barbecue. One wonders: Was it an accident or spontaneous combustion?
That question lies at the heart of Dorothy Allison's fine novel. Are we victims of our genes, passive receptors of family foibles? Or are we called upon to break out in anger at the risk of losing one's life? No simple answers here, of course. Allison is too good a writer to assume any such knowledge. Her people and places are absolutely real - visible and audible and palpable - without a shred of melodrama to pastel-tint their black-and-white lives.
"Bastard Out of Carolina" took Dorothy Allison 10 years to write. I'll gladly wait another 10 for her second if that's what it takes to produce a novel this authentic and memorable.
\ JOAN SCHROEDER IS A ROANOKE WRITER.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB