THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 25, 1994 TAG: 9412210224
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LYNN DEAN HUNTER
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
SHADOW SONG
TERRY KAY
Pocket Books. 388 pp. $20.
Maybe we're all just sitting around, waiting for somebody to sing again.
Fable, illusion and romantic wish-fulfillment are the subjects of Terry Kay's uneven new novel, Shadow Song. A former journalist based in Atlanta, Kay is best known for his realistic portraits of fictional Southern people and places. His other works include After Eli, The Year the Lights Came On and, most notably, To Dance With the White Dog.
In Shadow Song, Kay departs from his beloved Southern setting. The narrator, Bobo Murphy, is a midlife Georgia artist who returns to the scene of his first love, a summer resort in the legend-steeped Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. Serious students of wish-fulfillment stories will recall the Catskills as the hills in which Rip Van Winkle solved his marital problems by taking a long enchanted nap.
Poor Bobo's problems are not as easily solved. While he wraps up the details of an old friend's funeral, he recalls the love of his youth, Amy Lourie. Everyone he knows is trapped in an unfulfilling life, passively awaiting some relief. Many characters are one-dimensional, especially the women, who are blatantly typecast.
Amy, Bobo's lost love, is a pure, ageless beauty. Lila, the innkeeper's wife, is a damaged wanton. To make things worse, these shallow figures are captured in painfully stilted language. Sammy the innkeeper, Bobo tells the reader, ``imagines he is a sculptor, but he is not. He is, I sometimes think, a psychopath with a hammer and chisel who pulverizes stone out of an antediluvian urge for destruction.'' As for Sammy's wife: ``There is an eloquence about Lila that is like an instinct.''
The story line of Shadow Song is fraught with mysterious details: a haunting portrait of Bobo's lover (which turns out to be of her mother, who also had a secret); an ominous bike-riding urchin named Trinity. An impossible dreamlike atmosphere permits the novel's unlikely plot. Departed divas are heard singing in the mountains; truths turn into lies, and lies into truth; the lost lovers are reunited, and - voila - the old man's death brings about his own lifelong wish: True love conquers all.
Some worthy themes are introduced as the book begins - ethics and prejudice; nature vs. culture; destiny vs. free will - but these quickly fall aside as the plot rambles to a happily-ever-after conclusion.
Shadow Song is a tangled story instead of a well-woven tale. The reader who seeks meaning in a novel will close this one wondering what, if anything, it is about. MEMO: Lynn Dean Hunter is a poet and fiction writer who lives in Virginia
Beach. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket illustration by THOMAS WOODRUFF
Jacket design by JOHN GALL
by CNB