THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 2, 1995 TAG: 9506300673
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
FIVE MINUTES IN HEAVEN
LISA ALTHER
Dutton. 372 pp. $22.95.
MOLLY'S IS the face that will not go away. It haunts Jude's sleeping and waking hours - the cerulean eyes, the voice too husky for her small frame. Molly lives, though she is dead.
Jude cannot escape her, ``even by crossing the ocean two decades later.'' As readers, we crave to know more.
Such is the scene that Lisa Alther sets in her latest novel, Five Minutes in Heaven. Alther is the best-selling author of Kinflicks, Original Sins, Other Women and Bedrock. She is a Tennessee native who divides her time between Vermont and New York City.
Jude is a woman who loves women. She plays in the dunes, hollowing out places in the sand and fitting her body to the contours as if to one of her female lovers' bodies. We learn all this in the first few pages.
From there, we embark on a passionate coming-of-age story told in four parts. It is the tale of a girl whose mother dies when she is young. As the child grows older, her sexuality gently washes over her. As a woman, she only occasionally seeks pleasure with men. Her passion is for women with blue eyes.
Alther creates characters as real as anyone we've ever known. We live their joy and sense their secret pain. We know what it is to be imprisoned in their bodies. Alther weaves dream sequences and reality skillfully into a believable pattern that keeps us turning pages.
We come to know Jude through the great loves of her life, always measured against Molly - Jude's childhood love, the first to break her heart.
Peer pressure causes the two to temper their feelings for one another, and when Jude finds out that Molly has romantic feelings for a boy at school, she knows she has lost her forever.
Molly dies in a car accident on her way to a Baptist youth retreat, and Jude grows closer to their mutual childhood friend, Sandy.
Once she and Sandy become roommates, she finds out that he has visitors to his bedroom at night - strange men who perform wild sexual acts. Even so, Sandy wins her over, and they become lovers.
``Jude knew from her years with Molly that real love involved more than just generating friction between various body parts, as though human beings were nothing more than cicadas droning on the waning summer dusk. And real love, if you found it, seemed the only thing that mattered. The rest was just passing time until death claimed you.''
Jude realizes that the only person she wants is Sandy, as often and for as long as she can have him. But that isn't long.
When Anna walks into Jude's life, Jude looks in her eyes and sees Molly. But Jude also sees Anna's destructive side - the alcohol abuse, and her willingness to stay with an abusive husband. ``Why was she always drawn to people who wanted to slow-dance with danger?''
It is Jude who loses interest in the relationship. ``She thought about Molly with new sympathy, because this time it was Jude who had stopped loving first and who would feel the guilt for the rest of her life.''
In Five Minutes in Heaven, Alther captures what really matters. And in doing so, she broadens the definition of a love story.
- MEMO: June Arney is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Lisa Alther
by CNB