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

DATE: SUNDAY, November 13, 1994                   TAG: 9412030001
SECTION: BOOKS                    PAGE: B4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

MICHAEL PARKER'S STORIES ARE THE REAL THING

I don't want there to be any question about it: This is a rave review.

Reviewers receive, on a regular basis, rafts of really competent collections of short stories; the nation's multitudinous creative writing schools have pretty much guaranteed competency, at least, among published writers. Collections of neat (if hollow) "workshop stories" abound.

But it's surprisingly wonderful - and truly welcome - to receive even one collection that is not only competent, but also authentic, vivid, lucid and poetic. In short, a collection of stories that are "the real thing."

The stories and novellas in Michael Parker's "The Geographical Cure" are, indeed, "the real thing." Parker can slide in a shiv without a drop of blood or a prick of pain, and then twist it so delicately that you don't even know it's hurting until you hear yourself scream.

He can also make you laugh out loud.

In the story "Love Wild," grown men play cowboys and Indians for the entertainment of tourists at Frontierland. "I've always thought that if I didn't take the job seriously, it couldn't bother me," the story's narrator says. Unfortunately, what he's learned from blindly exploiting history has filtered down into the rest of his life; and so now he's also blindly exploiting his ex-wife, his brother-in-law, what remains of his own dignity, and his heritage.

The novella "As Told To" dissects family jealousies by examining the ways in which two brothers approach the practice of memoir-writing. "Revisionist family history," you could call their efforts. Neither brother learns nearly as much about the truth as do we, their readers.

But the finest piece in this collection of thoroughly fine pieces is the multivoiced novella, "Golden Hour." This is the most illuminating and frightening treatment of subtle racism that you will ever read. Here's the New South. And it's not a pretty picture.

Parker's stories are set in North Carolina, which gives them a trenchant realism for local readers. But they will be read with appreciative recognition nationwide.

Or, at least, they should be.

Monty S. Leitch is a writer and columnist for this paper.