THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 5, 1995 TAG: 9502010394
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY YOLANDA ROBINSON COLES
LENGTH: Short : 47 lines
IN SEARCH OF SATISFACTION
J. CALIFORNIA COOPER
Doubleday. 351 pp. $21.95.
IN IN SEARCH OF SATISFACTION, J. California Cooper, a master storyteller, does an excellent job of conveying the emotions that drive people to do what they do: need, desire, love, loneliness, greed, generosity. As in her first novel, Family, she presents a family in adversity. But the same adversity that sends members to the far corners of the globe also brings them together and home again.
The story begins in the post-Civil War South in Yoville, a town built expressly for the convenience of the Befoes, a white family. Josephus is a servant for another well-to-do white family, the Krupts. He fathers two daughters - one white, Yinyang, and one black, Ruth.
Each woman's search for satisfaction rules her actions. Ruth desires and needs love and family. She is willing to work hard to get and keep both. Yinyang, who lives guardedly in both worlds, is persuaded to take a less virtuous path by her desire for money. She, too, longs for family, but only if she can care financially for them.
Carlene Befoe, on the other hand, is born into opulence, having all of life's necessities and many of its frills. A daddy's girl, selfish, spoiled and arrogant, she commands with severe distaste most of the residents of Yoville. Her husband, Richard, is in fact her cousin. Her daughter, Richlene, is really her husband's father's child.
Cooper, a playwright and popular short-story writer, eloquently tells the dark side of human emotions. The struggle between good and evil is ever-present in the lives of her characters, as she plumbs the depths of the human soul. The ultimate question is not about satisfaction, but how far a person will go in searching for it. MEMO: Yolanda Robinson Coles is a free-lance children's book critic in Norfolk
and Durham, N.C. by CNB