THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 19, 1995 TAG: 9507190023
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
A BOY CAN FIND treasure in a mail-order gag catalog: joy buzzers, itching powders, fake vomit. Twelve-year-old Peter, protagonist of the title story in Robin Hemley's ``The Big Ear: Stories'' (John F. Blair, 203 pages, $18.95), is as enthralled with these gadgets as he is puzzled by the way his mother's voice and manner change when she talks to her poetry seminar students, or her sometime-boyfriend, Guido.
``Peter understands neither language; they seem spoken by two completely different people,'' Hemley writes. ``Sometimes he thinks his mother is two people - and that neither would like the other if they ever met.''
So the Big Ear, a plastic orange cone on a black tripod, seems the perfect eavesdropping gag, guaranteed to catch every nuance of distant conversation. He employs it, and the squirting toilet seat, when his mother hosts her students at home. He likes these women; he just doesn't know what to say to them. Peter is beginning to learn that he already knows as much about what his mother is saying as she does. That she, like most other adults, has no grasp of the mysteries of life.
Hemley combines a keen sense of the absurd with genuine affection for his characters in the 16 ``Big Ear'' stories. They may say silly things or engage in foolish, even dangerous, shenanigans, but he never ridicules or reproaches them for being fallible. Some story relationships are Kafkaesque.
In ``Letters to the Editor,'' Gloria discovers that her once-liberal mother seems to have absorbed the far-right persona of her late husband, and is writing inflammatory letters to the local paper. The first espouses the complete eradication of homosexuals (``If we do not do something soon, we will be taken over by this menace. . . Now that we have defeated the Russians, let's defeat the enemy at home!''). But it's Gloria who suffers the backlash, which involves threatening phone calls, uncooperative bank tellers and a bucket of pink paint. Is her mother just exercising her constitutional rights or punishing Gloria for her father's death?
In ``Hobnobbing With the Nearly Famous,'' a man saddled by his parents with the name Daniel Boone is president of a famous names club. He's overthrown by a subversive clique whose names are not spelled quite right, like Albert Einsteen and Alfred Hitchkoch. Beneath these petty absurdities lies the sad, single-minded mania of people so out of touch that they can only feel their own existence by pinching glamor from dead celeb-rities.
The ``Big Ear'' stories are peopled with characters from the queen of England to the last man on Earth. Occasionally Hemley allows surrealism or icon-bashing too much leverage, and the resulting absurdity teeters on the edge of caricature, as in the sweetly absurd snippet ``A Printer's Tale,'' or his portrayal of a randy, repressed Queen Elizabeth in ``The Intruder.'' He's finest at plumbing the hearts and minds of average folks, as in ``Sleeping Over,'' when a boy casually befriends the class misfit, and unwittingly provides a way to freedom for a desperate mother and abused son.
At his best, Hemley, a former North Carolinian now teaching at Western Washington University, is magical, powerful, frightening, holding a pocket mirror to lives we have seen, known and despaired of, reflecting the troubled images back at us with tender humor. MEMO: Lenore Hart, the author of ``Black River,'' lives on the Eastern Shore,
where she working on her second novel.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Former North Carolinian Robin Hemley teaches at Western Washington
University. by CNB