Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 5, 1995 TAG: 9502040009
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY M. KATHERINE GRIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The advertising campaign for ``Nell'' calls it ``an extraordinary motion picture about the power of innocence.'' Lawrence Naumoff's ``Silk Hope, NC'' is also about the power of innocence and the power of love, hope, and belief in the past, despite a world filled with greed, selfishness, and dedication to progress.
Frannie Vaughan and her sister, Natalie, come from a long line of passionate but tragic women, many of whom have suffered because of men and society's rigidity. At the death of their mother, the sihe subplot. Complications include Frannie's putting a vulgar poem in briefs she packages at the mill (a television evangelist finds the ditty and threatens to sue) and her teasing a local sleazeball, who later comes to attack her.
Frannie is often aided by an unlikely pair - a man with one arm and a 400-pound sow. Her luck balances her lack of judgement, while Natalie has the opposite problem. But Naumoff's attitude toward luck seems to be related to moral worth: the good are rewarded; the bad, punished.
The novel is generally quite readable; however, occasionally Naumoff tries too hard to sound like Faulkner:
``Because women now knew all the words they needed to know and because Natalie knew these words and because she also knew she loved Jake and because Frannie now knew all the words and what they meant except, according to Natalie, what she now knew with Jake, Frannie didn't understand that it was no longer necessary to cling to the house and to the ancestral mandate as if there might be trouble that could not be understood or predicted or overcome.''
As this long-winded excerpt suggests, male-female relationships provide much of the conflict and some of the resolution in the novel. Feminists might balk at saintly Reuben, but he must be weighed against the abandoning father, the sleazy would-be attacker, the old man who delights in shooting animals, Natalie's greedy boyfriend, and the man who tricked Natalie and Frannie's great-grandmother. Naumoff's gender does not prevent his creating bad men or a believable female protagonist.
Naumoff apparently aims to write a truly literary novel that pits human values - love and hope - against baser human desires - sex and wealth - and he generally succeeds. The reader wonders throughout which will win. Perhaps the answer is neither, or maybe both. But the answer is worth finding, especially for those of us who are New Southerners, pulled by the land, family, and the past on one hand and the glitter and money that progress can bring on the other. (Are any of you thinking of that Disney U.S.A. theme park?) Occasionally we need someone to make us question our priorities and to remind us, as ``Silk Hope, NC'' does, of the beauty and fragility of our dreams.
Like Jodie Foster's Nell, Frannie Vaughan is first presented as a curiosity. But the more we know of both these women, the more we wonder not at them but at the world into which they never really fit.
Anna Wentworth reviews books and plays.
by CNB