THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 4, 1995 TAG: 9506010499
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MARI LoNANO
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
POLITE SOCIETY
MELANIE SUMNER
Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence. 204 pp. $21.95.
MANY TIMES when I have been feeling lost in my own journey through life, I have considered entering the Peace Corps, thinking it would be a place to reflect, work hard and find myself. Darren Parkman, the 25-year-old protagonist of all but one of Melanie Sumner's eight stories in Polite Society, thought so too:
``She had grown up in a wealthy family and always managed to attract money, but somehow the gloss of elegance never showed up on her. Her mother pushed for more make-up; her father smoothed her hair as he talked to her about table manners, but no matter what she wore or where she went, the creatures her parents called subhumans recognized Darren as one of their own.'' And so, because she doesn't know what she wants or who she is, Darren enlists in the Peace Corps and is sent to Senegal, West Africa.
But what Darren finds upon her arrival in Senegal is bleak: no job because the university where she is supposed to teach is on strike. Not that she is even trained to teach. And because Darren brings her lost self everywhere she wanders in Senegal, she encounters mostly difficulty and fear.
``Spiritus'' is the longest, strongest and also the wittiest of these autobiographical stories. It explains Darren's, and perhaps Sumner's, dreams and behavior: ``When I was 25,'' she says, ``I ran away from home. My parents cheered me on. By that time I had lost a series of demeaning jobs and let my boyfriend get away. . . The Peace Corps took me because I have such a nice face.''
Darren left Tennessee, her family and everything safe - Sumner grew up in Rome, Ga., and studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Boston University - and landed in Senegal, a country where the people are ``blue-black'' and where the customs are so strange that they often frighten her. Throughout her travels in Senegal, where Sumner spent two years in the Peace Corps, Darren seeks to find something at which she is good, someone who will love her and some sort of understanding of who she is or should be.
None of these stories is happy. Darren falls in love with the wrong man a number of times, tries interracial romance, drinks herself into what she calls her ``black hole'' and dissipates herself as a form of punishment for being the woman she is. In spite of being warned, over and over, about Sengalese men, Darren constantly falls for their traps: ``These guys sit around smoking their cigarettes, listening to their transistors, waiting for the Peace Corps to send them a fresh batch of American girls. . . You are alone. I hope you are not looking for love. You have no idea what Sengalese men think of women.''
Some of these stories are downright harrowing. Sumner's use of description, her details of life in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, are quite vivid. While Darren is in Dakar, riots break out; civil unrest abounds; beggars crowd the streets. As an American, she is fair game for everyone who sees her. At rock-bottom of her journey, she leaves Dakar on a pilgrimage to Timbuktu, where she sits in bar after bar, drinking.
By the last story in the book, ``A Fool in Love,'' Darren seems to be coming to some sense of self-recognition. The story is told first by a ``fool'' or madman, who says to her, ``Are you afraid that you might fall off the earth if you don't hold on?'' Of course, the ``fool,'' as often is true in Shakespeare, is wise. Darren recognizes this, too, and travels metaphorically through Senegal with the fool on her path: ``In Senegal, he says, only crazy people walk alone.''
Polite Society is a strong and disturbing collection of stories, told by a talented and compassionate writer who understands the failings of the human heart. After recognizing, along with Darren Parkman, that the journey toward the self is continuous and not geographic, I no longer think the sometimes decadent Peace Corps is the place to locate one's self. MEMO: Mari LoNano is a writer and part-time graduate student at William and
Mary who lives in Norfolk. by CNB