The Virginian-Pilot
                            THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT  
              Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Sunday, October 16, 1994               TAG: 9410140793
SECTION: COMMENTARY               PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Book Review 
SOURCE: BY LYNN DEAN HUNTER
                                             LENGTH: Long  :  103 lines

FROM MANY VOICES, ONE CHOIR

Contemporary Southern fiction, distinguished by tight plotting, fine detail and a raw blend of humor and angst, is gaining acceptance as serious literature. It's about time. Or, in regional parlance, it's been time. Two new collections support the growing recognition: New Stories From the South: The Year's Best, 1994, edited by Shannon Ravenel, and Dannye Romine Powell's Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers.

Ravenel considered entries from more than 90 literary magazines before choosing the rich array of style and subject represented in New Stories From the South, the ninth anthology in this annual series from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. This volume of 16 finely crafted stories, written by newcomers as well as prominent authors Richard Bausch, Frederick Barthelme and Reynolds Price, asks universal questions in a variety of Southern accents: What is ``civilized behavior''? Do sex and gender traits completely define us? What ``racism'' exists in black Africa?

In ``My Other Life,'' Georgia author Melanie Sumner brings a Southern white Peace Corps volunteer into tribal territory, her Tennessee parents in tow, to meet the mother of Yousouf, the African man she loves. The vast culture gap, at once poignant and hilarious, becomes clear as Yousouf translates his mother's greeting:

`` `My mother says that since she does not speak French or Wolof, and you do not speak Mandinka, you cannot talk to each other.' She smiled at me. There was nothing coy or malicious about it. It was a beautiful, kind, wise smile, and I understood that she would never give me her son.''

Fiction from the New South does not present a polite or nostalgic perspective. Characters use drugs, refuse cancer treatment, consider mass murder and beat their livestock. Barthelme's ``Retreat,'' set at an academic convention on Alabama's gulf coast, shows a culture at once vulgar, charming and grotesque. One character, repelled by the roasting of a whole pig in the hotel fish pond, retreats to her room, scans the news on her portable computer and discovers a fascinating piece about a woman beheading her children as a sacrifice before a stock car race.

Some of the stories put a new spin on an old Southern theme: the present-day South as a region still beset by its history.

In Tony Earley's ``The Prophet From Jupiter,'' the past literally lurks beneath the surface. The narrator is a dam-keeper at a manmade lake in the North Carolina mountains. His job is to ensure that the dam doesn't overflow, flooding the adjacent resort, or that the lake doesn't get too low - low enough for summer folk to see the drowned ghost town under the water. Writes Earley:

``When Lake Glen was built, it covered the old town of Uree with eighty-five feet of water. As the dam was raised higher and higher across the river, workmen did not tear down the houses. Fish swim in and out of the open doors. Old Man Bill Burdette left his 1916 chain-drive Reo truck parked beside his house when he moved away.''

``No topic is taboo today,'' Ravenel propounds in the preface to New Stories From the South. ``It's clear that the great themes of literature are likely to hold for as long as human beings are around to write and read. It's the specifics from which those themes are built that change.''

Ravenel, a North Carolina native and editor of the ``Best American Short Stories'' series from 1977-90, has had a hand in the evolution of contemporary fiction. During her tenure at Algonquin, she has fostered such writers as Dori Sanders (Clover; Her Own Place); Jill McCorkle (Crash Diet; Ferris Beach); Julia Alvarez (How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents); Kaye Gibbons (A Cure For Dreams); and Clyde Edgerton (Raney; In Memory of Junior).

In Dannye Romine Powell's Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers, Edgerton, Sanders, Gibbons and 20 other authors, including Maya Angelou, Walker Percy and William Styron, speak about their work habits, inspirations and homes. Powell, an award-winning poet and former book editor for The Charlotte Observer, came to these interviews well-prepared. Her conversations are filled with discoveries, observations and lively language.

Reading these interviews, I began to wonder if creative inspiration is somehow shared by Southern writers, or simply passed along through the groundwater.

Edgerton speaks of seeing Eudora Welty on television reading her short story ``Why I Live at the P.O.'' and deciding: ``Tomorrow morning, I will start writing fiction seriously.''

Then Welty talks about meeting William Faulkner: ``I was scared to meet him. I was surprised he was so small - or compared to me - because I think of him as a giant.'' And she remembers the young Reynolds Price: ``I wouldn't say I discovered him. . . . Anybody who read him knew that here it was, the real thing.''

Parting the Curtains is enriched by Jill Krementz's photographs, taken over two decades. One especially memorable shot depicts Price and Welty laughing together in 1972.

Powell's insightful questions bring illuminating answers. While interviewing Allan Gurganus (Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All), she remarks on the sense of community among Southern writers. Gurganus' reply exposes much about the writing from the New South:

``The tradition we're working with is so rich and is so various that there's room in it for all of us. We're all in some ways telling the same story, but from different parts of the choir loft.`` MEMO: Lynn Dean Hunter is a fiction writer and book critic who lives in

Virginia Beach. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

JILL KREMENTZ

Maya Angelou is one of more than 20 Southern writers who speak about

their work and influences in ``Parting the Curtains.''

by CNB