THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 2, 1995 TAG: 9508020049
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY AUDREY KNOTH, SPECIAL TO THE DAILY BREAK
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
A GIRL LEAVES home for the Big Apple, gets a job, falls in love. What might seem like a typical plot becomes an exceptionally moving tale thanks to the gifted pen of first-time novelist Barbara Wright. Her feel for character and place graces ``Easy Money'' (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 390 pp., $18.95).
The story centers on 18-year-old Jay Winbourne. At the start of the book, she is living with her father, Jack, in Denver. Jay's mother died when she was small and over the years, Jay has assumed more and more domestic responsibilities.
In particular, she handles the household finances: She has learned that her father can't be trusted in this area. A promising playwright in his youth, Jack turned to playing the stock market after his wife's death.
``He developed a system of oscillators to predict market movement and he was constantly refining it, working like a mad scientist, trying out this theory and that theory to see what combination worked. He made money, he lost money, but mostly he lost.''
Shortly before her high school graduation, Jay discovers that her father has been using her college fund to subsidize his market theories and it has disappeared. Jay sells the family's battered Chevrolet for $600 and moves to New York to distance herself from her father and her past.
The novel traces Jay's evolution into a new life. There's the dispirited search for a job that ends in triumph when a blind Korean author hires her as a reader; the renting of her very own, albeit rundown, studio apartment; the chance encounter at a seedy jazz club with a jaded older musician who becomes her lover.
Through it all, Jay retains a touching sweetness that compels the reader to care very much about when happens to her. For example, when she daydreams about her new boyfriend:
``She could imagine telling Russ all her stupid little thoughts about what made the world such a wonderful place. Like how a school of minnows can dart this way and that, in unison, and never run into each other. Or how, after a prairie fire, the heat burst open long-dormant husks and the spring meadows bloom with flowers never seen there before. And he wouldn't laugh or think she was strange.''
Besides drawing a captivating character, Wright presents evocative images of New York: ``Autumn arrived in a wash of color. . . Every-thing had clarity to it. When the sun went down over the Hudson, there was one glorious moment when light washed down the apartment facades like a molten waterfall. Down the long corridor of buildings you could see, framed at the end, an enormous golden orb, creating the illusion you could drive straight down one of the numbered streets and into the sun.''
Jay breaks with her lover after he begins selling cocaine. He dreams, just like her father, of making easy money. Ultimately, a series of events causes her to reconcile with her dad: ``She wished she could say, after all that had happened, that she was wise and sure of herself, but she was not. Mostly, she was cautious.''
``Easy Money'' offers the rarest of literary treasures - a character that not only intrigues, but arouses real emotion. MEMO: Audrey Knoth is a free-lance writer and executive director of public
relations at Goldman & Associates in Norfolk.
by CNB