ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 7, 1996 TAG: 9607090004
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
BOOKMARKS.
Short stories offer redemption by fire
Reviewed by JOAN VANNORSDALL SCHROEDER
ACID. By Edward Falco. University of Notre Dame Press. $25.
Finish reading Ed Falco's latest short-story collection, and days later you'll still feel its rough edges and uncompromising stare. That's a promise. The compensation for your temporary discomfort: small, layered redemptions in a world that has lost its easy hiding places.
Most of Falco's characters know intimately the dark side of things. Murder, drugs and abusive parents shade these stories, but never gratuitously. In the title story, an ex-jazz musician and drug user sits in his religious bookstore, The Living Word, and must decide whether he'll succumb to an offer to drop acid with Alice, a neighboring shopkeeper young enough to be his daughter.
Religion - daily communion - has become Jerome's drug: "He felt himself change as the wafer dissolved on his tongue: a warming light seeped into the dark places in his body." And when he remembers his angry beating of a young lover 20 years earlier, then drives to the club where a drugged-up Alice waits for him, we hope the transformation is real enough to save them both.
Drugs also figure prominently in "The Artist," which was published in the Atlantic and the 1995 edition of "Best American Short Stories." Jim is 46, a video artist married to a doctor, and father to three children. He comes home to find a friend from the past sitting at his kitchen table with his wife. What Jim does to protect his carefully structured life leaves the reader numb with disbelief, but more chilling is the realization that he will turn the event into a video-art project.
In some of the stories, the danger is more subtle but every bit as dangerous. Wives disappear into thin air; they die in car accidents; they leave their bewildered husbands to care for adolescent children. Parents revisit the sins of their fathers on their own children. Love fails in small increments; betrayals happen for complex reasons, leaving the world a sadder place for everyone.
In "Petrified Wood," motherless, 12-year-old Katrina has the wrong friends, and when her father pulls her out of the back seat of a car and tells her to change her clothes and wash off her exaggerated makeup, Katrina accuses him of hating her. Knowing that she is begging for a profession of love, her father dismisses her. One wishes he had chosen to hit her, like his own father had struck him with a piece of petrified wood, rather than inflict the far dirtier wound of indifference.
Still, Falco leaves his reader with possibilities. The final story in the collection, "Gifts," was included in Falco's "Plato at Scratch Daniels's." In it, a late-middle-aged husband and wife have watched their family home and most of their belongings disappear in a fire. Now living in their dead son's remote cabin, they remember his life in the turbulent '70s and know it was a hard gift.
Howard and his girlfriend, T.J., had disappeared, living phoneless and without mail delivery to search for a truth that was incomprehensible to his middle-class parents. And when Howard dies at 26 of an unnamed, wasting illness, his parents are left wondering about his final words: "Death is a gift, too."
"I thought I knew what he meant then. I thought he meant death would be an end to his suffering, and to my having to watch him suffer. But now I don't think that's what he meant at all. The night of the fire ... I looked at the flames and felt all through me the uniqueness and the beauty of things in time
It is Falco's storied sharing of those times of revelation that makes his collection memorable. Difficult and painful as they may be, Falco's stories always tell the truth and leave the reader wanting to do the same.
Joan Vannorsdall Schroeder is the author of "Solitary Places"
Edward Falco teaches writing and literature at Virginia Tech. This collection of stories is the winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize for Short Fiction.
Theatre at Lime Kiln presents new folk tale
"The Baker, The Bear and the Blacksmith," the newest folk tale by Theater at Lime Kiln will be presented in Babcock Auditorium at Hollins College on Monday at 10 a.m. The free production is open to the public.
Inventive stories depict Latin American Jewish fiction
Reviewed by DABNEY STUART
THE ONE-HANDED PIANIST AND OTHER STORIES. By Ilan Stavans. University of New Mexico Press. $22.50.
The publicity sheet accompanying Ilan Stavans' collection reports that his work has won two prizes: The Latino Literature Prize (1989) and the Gamma Literature Prize (1992). What these awards are, and who sponsors and judges them, is not explained.
This volume itself is composed of two novellas - "The Invention of Memory" and "Talia in Heaven" - six short pieces and a concluding autobiographical essay. The fictional portion of the book is translated by various people, including the author. The autobiography is written in English. The author presents himself as having had the chaotic experience of being a Jew in Mexico; the publisher presents the work as "evidence of the vitality of the growing field of Latin American Jewish fiction."
The writing is vital. It is energetic and conceptually inventive. Reading "The One-Handed Pianist" is an entry into chaos, only relatively controlled by the magician who manipulates it.
In the autobiographical piece Stavans asks, parenthetically, "Am I a name dropper?" The answer is yes. He is careful to enumerate the many writers he has read and digested, the many intellectuals whose ideas he borrows, the main sources of his literary acumen.
Franz Kafka is chief among these; his idol, Kafka makes an appearance in most every story, either by reference or imitation. Stavans also sounds like Borges, Joyce, Cortazar and a host of others to whom his work is host. Part of the chaos of these fictions, then, is their many voices, intended, one would surmise, as an homage to all those people to whom Stavans owes so much - indeed, almost everything.
Deriving an insight from Borges enabled Stavans, one summer day, to decide who and what he wanted to be. "I understood [where] my linguistic future lay tradition celebrated by Alfred Kazin ... and I did." He elaborates later on this choice by saying, "I write in order to remember and be remembered." He also states that "the only certainty is that a library is a triumph over nothingness."
Stavan's stories, then, embody this identity: a man displaced in both language and place. They are intimately and pervasively derivative, cerebral, and dry. This is a book for very special tastes.
Dabney Stuart's recent book is "Light Years: New and Selected Poems."
Outdoor writer spins yarns
Reviewed by TONI WILLIAMS
PURPLE HEAVEN AND OTHER STORIES. By John Madison Culler. John Culler & Sons. $21.95.
Most folks can probably recall a family member known for their ability to spin yarns. Culler strikes me as the star tale-teller of his clan who acted upon urgings from friends and family and published his stories, complete with handsome illustrations. As a former editor of South Carolina Wildlife and Outdoor Life magazines and the founder of Sporting Classics magazine, the field is familiar to him.
Many of these concise stories reflect Culler's fondness for the fishing and hunting life. Some illustrate a moral that is not-so-subtly summed up at the end, as in "Purple Heaven," where the narrator finds himself in heaven and things seem too good to be true. Some are memoirs of adolescence in the South Carolina low country. Some are tall tales, like "The Last Regiment," in which a man encounters a steadfast band of Civil War soldiers. A few stories, such as "The Great Nauga Project," delight in pulling the reader's leg. Humor prevails throughout.
This book would make a fitting gift for the outdoorsperson or one's parents who enjoy light reading.
Toni Williams writes from her home near Natural Bridge.
Woman scandalized Texan neighbors a century ago
Reviewed by LYNN ECKMAN
THE PASSION OF DELLIE O'BARR. By Cindy Bonner. Algonquin. $18.95.
McDade, Texas, a century ago, was dusty, parochial and hot. Its residents held traditional values, especially about a woman's place. That did not change because of Dellie O'Barr's outrageous conduct, but she did give people a lot to talk about.
In her third novel Cindy Bonner uses real people and events for background, but it is her own creation, Dellie, who demands attention. At 20 she has been married for two years to an older man, a lawyer and cattle rancher. It seems a "very satisfactory marriage" to everyone but Dellie. One day she sees Andy Ashland, a populist with wild ideas, and she falls in love with him and with his party.
Dellie leaves good, steady Daniel to pursue Andy. Before doing so, she sets fire to the local store, the symbol of oppression to the poor, and unwittingly becomes a heroine to the suffragists. Nothing turns out as she had planned, which makes this a good tale.
At the end of the book Dellie remarks, "I wish I could say we all of us lived happily ever after. But, of course life doesn't work out that way."
Even so, reading about her and those she scandalizes proves great fun.
Lynn Eckman teaches at Roanoke College.
Robert Crais' pace, plot and style please
SUNSET EXPRESS. By Robert Crais. Hyperion. $21.95.
Terry Martin, a wealthy restaurateur, has been accused of murdering his wife. Jonathan Green, a high-profile defense attorney, hires private investigator Elvis Cole to corroborate the suggestion that the evidence against Martin has been planted by Angela Rossi, an LAPD policewoman. Cole, finding nothing to incriminate Rossi, becomes increasingly suspicious of Green's hot-shot law firm and its team of sycophantic attorneys.
This fast-paced thriller has all the excitement any reader could wish. It is the fifth Elvis Cole novel, and each one is well worth reading, especially for those who like laconic private investigators in the same mold as Robert Parker's Spenser and James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux.
- JILL BOWEN
SUNSET EXPRESS. By Robert Crais. Audio. Read by David Stuart. Unabridged. Brilliance. $23.95.
David Stuart captures the sarcastic, wise-cracking nature of private eye Elvis Cole in his reading of "Sunset Express." He brings life to confrontations with the overly smooth and media conscious lawyers, but even his valiant efforts cannot rescue the predictable and gooey scenes between Cole and his girlfriend.
Crais has established a solid niche for his generally likeable character, but, as blasphemous as it may sound to those who, like me, generally prefer the whole kit and caboodle to an abridgement, this is one that could have been shortened with no consequential loss.
- MARY ANN JOHNSON
Jill Bowen is a veterinarian who lives in Blacksburg.
Mary Ann Johnson is the book page editor.
Collecting folk art
Reviewed by BOB FISHBURN
CONTEMPORARY FOLK ART: A Collector's Guide. By Chuck and Jan Rosenak. Abbeyville Press. $29.95.
This well-designed, jam-packed - if pricey - guide by two well-known collectors might be considered a mini-encyclopedia of folk art. It covers, briefly but adequately, the understanding, evaluating, collecting and selling of folk art, plus a region-by-region evaluation of major artists, with both black-and-white and color illustrations and a museum and price guide.
In a field as fast-changing as this one, the authors might be accused of trying to corral marbles on a sloping table, but they are well aware of the difficulties and avoid definitive judgments.
They seek to answer the ultimate question facing any starting collector: What constitutes folk art and how can the genuine article be separated from what they call "faux" folk. Their criteria - that the real stuff is, apart from the craft that might underpin it, self-taught and that it "comes from the soul of the artist and is not inspired by some other source" - provide help but still leave a fledgling collector with questions that only self-training or consulting an expert can answer.
Bob Fishburn is former editor of this newspaper's commentary page.
LENGTH: Long : 222 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Falco.by CNB