THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 16, 1995 TAG: 9508160022
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
THE FIRST HINT that ``Songs in Ordinary Time'' (Viking, 740 pp., $24.95) will be a quirky tale comes when we meet Judge Henry Clay gazing out his window.
The lady who runs his boarding house touches his hand, makes small talk and works his room with her atomizer of Sweet Lily.
``First she sprayed the rose-papered walls, the stained Persian carpet, the Judge's soft bed, his wardrobe of limp dark suits, his oak filing cabinets inurned with a half century's pledges and breeches and secrets, and now, finally, she sprayed the good judge himself, now entering his thirtieth hour of death,'' writes author Mary McGarry Morris.
While Morris offers up abundant twists and surprises in ``Songs In Ordinary Time,'' the author of ``Vanished'' and ``A Dangerous Woman'' also masterfully weaves the routine of daily life into compelling reading. Her characters are unforgettable. We meet a man who makes obscene phone calls from the bathroom of his appliance store and a priest who falls in love.
Morris, whose writing has been compared to John Steinbeck's and Dickens', has crafted a book that does not read long, at more than 700 pages. The people who inhabit her novel are fascinating and complex, and their interactions with one another ring true.
The setting is Atkinson, Vt., in the summer of 1960 - a time of innocence lost. Marie Fermoyle and her three children, Alice, 17, Norm, 16, and Benjy, 12, are no exceptions.
Norm watches as his mother, a lonely woman raising her children with little help from an alcoholic ex-husband, falls under the spell of Omar Duvall, a smooth con man and womanizer new to town. Writes Morris:
``For Norm, his mother's happiness these last few weeks seemed a shimmering fragile bubble. Even the shattering pitch of her laughter sent a shiver up his spine, its sudden rawness so much like crying that he would tense, ready to spring, his hands clutching the arms of the chair. He had never seen her like this before, gullible and giggly, at times even shy and blushing. He sensed in Duvall a strange element, some dark and discernible emanation that both fouled and thinned the air, shrinking the tiny rooms in this box of a house smaller still.''
Benjy is the one who remains hopeful that Duvall will be his mother's dream come true. Although he alone knows Duvall's evil secret, Benjy also knows that Duvall has exorcised the ``angry, panicky'' woman his mother had become.
Marie's ex-husband is a sloppy drunk who often embarrasses the family. But Morris obviously knows the dynamics that bind a person to a loved one who drinks too much, and her writing is powerful:
``With each birth, each new job, the separation, the divorce, with her tears, with her love, and with every denial she had continued to plumb him, sinking deeper each time in the search for his decency, his strength, his love, drowning, pulling her children after her, instructing them not with words but with example and the tenacity of her hope that if they loved him enough, if they were patient enough, if they were good enough, and kind enough, and forgiving enough, then he would not drink again. He would mend his life and theirs.''
Framed against all that Morris tells us, is the image of the Klubocks, who live next door - the croquet-playing, perfect-living Klubocks. Jessie Klubock, bakes cookies, plants bulbs before the ground freezes and gives away fruitcakes soaked in rum at Christmas. She also waits anxiously for amorous phone calls from an anonymous man. Is anything as it seems?
For all the strengths of Morris' latest novel, the book spirals to a conclusion that is dramatic but predictable. For some, it may be an abrupt disappointment. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Mary McGarry Morris weaves the routine of daily life into a
compelling tale in her new book.
by CNB