THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 2, 1995 TAG: 9506300674
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY TYRONE A. STEVERSON
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
HOLLY
ALBERT FRENCH
Viking. 308 pp. $22.95.
FEW TALES of passion and outrage at once compel and revolt quite like Albert French's Holly, his second and more volatile novel about American mores and culture.
Two years ago French startled with Billy, a tragic tale of a 10-year-old black boy executed for killing a white girl. In Holly, French once again tells a poignant and disturbing tale, but this one explores interracial passion. It's not a movie-star story of a white man extinguishing his passion with a black woman. No, it's a tale of shame, outrage and doom occurring when a white woman falls in love with a black man.
French carries us back to Supply, N.C., to the summer of 1944, and breathes life into every corner of this slumbering Southern town. Time has its way of sitting with the old men at the courthouse, unchanged and unchanging, sheltered, that is, until World War II jars them all to attention. Then, as the Southern-voiced narrator tells us, the folk of Supply, especially the ``coloreds'' living on the other side of Velvet Creek in the Back Land, want time to bring change faster, while others want time to halt altogether. Everyone wants to see loved ones return home safely from the war.
One casualty at sea shatters Holly Hill's 19-year-old world forever: the death of her fiance, Billy Felter, whom Holly had recently jilted. Grief-stricken and remorseful, repulsed by her own self-serving emotions, Holly retreats to Velvet Creek to seek the solace she had enjoyed as a child. Instead, she finds the unexpected, and her coming-of-age explodes.
Holly, a poor white girl who has only dreamed of kissing the local dreamboat, falls in love with a young, handsome, educated black veteran, Elias Owens, who wants to be a painter though he has lost an arm during the war. Elias becomes the man of Holly's dreams: He will rescue her from a bleak life in Supply and sweep her away to Washington, D.C.
But the love-struck Holly cannot keep secret her taboo affection for Elias. In a dreadful error, she shares her elation with her best friend, unwittingly triggering a tragic chain of events that will leave many readers in tears, and many others too disgusted to cry.
Comparisons to the works of Toni Morrison, Harper Lee, Richard Wright and other masters of the American social dilemma are inevitable, considering the capacity French has for recreating characters of an era. Using cinematic technique and fragile dialect, he gives form and lyricism to an omniscient narrator. Cast against a distant background of war, Holly and Elias' love affair seems removed from, but at odds with, a threatening society in change. French appears to say that it is easier for some people to overcome the incredible inhumanity of a distant holocaust than to overcome the inhumanity within their own hearts.
Holly would be far less poignant if it were not still so timely. MEMO: Tyrone A. Steverson is a former editor and a supervisor at Barnes &
Noble Booksellers in Virginia Beach. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by ROBIN LOCKE MONDA
Jacket photo by ANNE ARDEN MCDONALD
by CNB