Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 11, 1993 TAG: 9307130346
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by ROBERT RIVENBARK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Readers who enjoyed Peter Taylor's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "A Summons to Memphis" should be delighted with this new collection of stories, novellas and one-act plays.
Most of the stories and novellas are first-person accounts from a masculine narrator who is undoubtedly Taylor himself. Unlike John Cheever, the acerbic chronicler of upper-middle-class New England, Taylor is more wistful toward his affluent Southerners; though, like Cheever, he is as much an explorer of morals as manners.
Writing in a spare and musical style, Taylor paints a portrait of Tennessee society of the 1930s and '40s. He is nostalgic for the certitudes and privileges of an established society; yet his stories and plays show how oppressive that society can be for those whose spirits want to soar beyond its confines. He dramatizes the suffocating pressure that convention brings to bear on people, and shows how the past exercises a killing power over the present.
In the title story a callow Tennessean stops over in Washington, D.C., on furlough before shipping out to fight in World War II. He visits his aging Aunt Augusta St. Johns-Jones, widow of a Tennessee congressman, a woman given to witchcraft and hypnotic powers. After he is smitten with a young woman bent on climbing the Washington political ladder, Aunt Augusta uses her occult powers to manipulate the girl's affections in her nephew's favor.
The occult and supernatural play a role in several other plays and stories, among the best of which is "The Witch of Owl Mountain Springs." Lizzy Pettigru, an eccentric Southern belle, is thrown over by her fiance for another girl. She withdraws into a solitary life in a mountain vacation cabin. Her eccentric behavior convinces the mountain people that she is a witch. The male narrator plays a marginal role, voicing his growing sense that she actually does possess supernatural powers, and expressing horror at the revenge she exacts on her ex-fiance and his wife.
In "Cousin Audrey," the son of a prominent Tennessee political family disappears from conventional society to live as a playboy and world traveler. In "At the Art Theater," an affianced couple gets a preview of the dreary life their conventional marriage will bring them. In "An Overwhelming Question," a young playboy tries to arouse his fiance's repressed sexuality, with fatal results. The three one-act plays bring the ghosts of the past on stage to work their killing influence on the living.
Generally, Taylor is more effective in his longer stories, though his plays have power and concentration as well. He needs the elbow room of the novella to develop his characters and build his dramatic effects. In his best work he delivers a powerful emotional wallop, teaching his readers much about the human condition in the process.
Robert Rivenbark is a Blacksburg writer.
by CNB