THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 14, 1996 TAG: 9601120705
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JAMES E. PERSON JR.
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
THE FENNEL FAMILY PAPERS
WILLIAM BALDWIN
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 284 pp. $19.95.
The Fennel Family Papers is about a little bit of everything - except the predictable.
This novel is about - what? - Paul Danvers, a hapless history professor at a jerkwater college in South Carolina who is hanging onto his position by his fingernails. A mama's boy and an educated fool who entertains visions of academic grandeur, he is snookered by the most trivial activities in life. One wonders who reminds him to close his refrigerator door every day.
Picture George from TV's ``Senifeld'' [sic] without the charisma, add fear of everything outside the confines of a college library, and you have a close approximation of Paul.
Paul discovers that one of his students, young Ginny Fennel, belongs to the famed Fennel family of Port Ulacca, S.C. The Fennels are the centuries-long keepers of an ancient coastland lighthouse - and of family papers that promise to clear up a puzzling historical mystery:
Unconfirmed rumor has it that the Fennels surrendered a crucial nearby inlet to the Federals during the War between the States, effectively closing off the last Southern port open to Rebel blockade runners, and thus playing a major role in the Confederacy's defeat.
Access to the Fennel family papers, of which boxfuls exist, would surely lead to the solving of the mystery, the writing of a major scholarly article, and job security for the researcher fortunate enough to get his or her hands on the papers. When Paul commences an affair with Ginny, he thinks his ship has come in.
But once among the Fennels, Paul is in a Cloud Cuckoo-Land of eccentrics: Ginny's crusty old martinet of a grandmother, a woman offended by even the hint that her family has ever been less than honorable and noble; an ancient black couple, Brown Jack Simmons and Da Bena, who speak in Gullah to each other and seem to possess the wisdom of the ages behind their practiced expressions of ignorance; Ginny herself, who either suffers from multiple-personality disorder or is periodically possessed by the ghost of her grandmother (also named Virginia); Ginny's brutal uncle, Leroy, who clearly intends to kill Paul with his bare hands; and Adam, Ginny's silent, wheelchair-bound father, a man who fell from the lighthouse peak years ago while trying to fly.
Add to this strange brew Ginny's mother, the person closest to normalcy, and the arrival on the scene of Paul's academic rival, and the result is a compelling story that tempts the reader to finish the novel in one sitting.
At the novel's conclusion, Paul has faced his greatest fears and become a more fully realized human being, with something resembling a livable future ahead of him. And the reader witnesses a man fly - yes, fly - from the lighthouse.
The Fennel Family Papers is a variation of Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, while falling just this side of a ``the-night-the-hogs-ate-Willie'' novel. It is a whirling pastiche that contains echoes of the black folk tale The People Could Fly, cheek-by-jowl with The Three Faces of Eve and the works of the South American ``magic realists.''
But The Fennel Family Papers, while enjoyable, is not as accomplished or as memorable as author William Baldwin's first novel, The Hard to Catch Mercy. The earlier novel was a tour de force of spookily familiar oddity, whereas this new work is a far earthier symphony of sheer weirdness, played with all stops pulled out from beginning to end.
In both novels, Baldwin's overriding theme remains the same: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Human nature is a constant, and while humanity is not perfectible, some sort of sublime wonder keeps breaking in, keeps crossing over from somewhere, something that might bear the fingerprints of God.
In this light, The Fennel Family Papers is a literary buck-and-wing dance, with Baldwin offering a fuller, even truer portrait of life than is found in the many crabbed, dreary exercises in so-called realism being tapped out today by lesser writers. MEMO: James E. Person Jr., a native of Virginia who now lives in Michigan, is
the editor of ``The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor of Russell
Kirk.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Baldwin
by CNB