THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, February 16, 1996 TAG: 9602160631
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines
May I introduce you to a mixed-up, delightful 12-year-old who appears in a new novel, ``Molly Flanagan and the Holy Ghost,'' published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $17.95.
Along with Molly, there are her turbulent, widespread family, eccentric neighbors, and the City of Memphis, where the author, Margaret Skinner, lives.
Don't let your approach to the book be shaped by its author being a woman or its subject a girl-child. This reader, twice the author's age, found the experiences of a girl of the 1950s touching his boyhood of the 1930s at several points.
Molly has reasons to be troubled. She is caught in a tug of war for her soul between a Catholic godmother and a Baptist grandmother. The latter also teaches her piano, for which Molly's talent is modest. In the offing is a dreaded recital.
There is tension, too, between her parents' families and in her having double vision, a lazy eye, which adults say must be corrected by exercises or an operation.
``What they failed to recognize,'' she feels, ``was seeing two things at the same time was a gift, a talent none of them owned or imagined.'' Molly develops a sort of synthesis of religions by turning for comfort to the Holy Ghost, the least known and most mysterious one of the Trinity. In her allegiance to that member she aims to make up ``for the years, even centuries of neglect.''
She has allies, one being her handsome, teasing, older brother Nat, in whom talents crop up ``as unexpectedly as dandelions.'' He plays the piano by ear.
Near the close she discovers that Nat has come through passages as deep and complex as her own.
Another friend is the black household worker, Lena, who fills her spare time in drawing on the walls of her home biblical scenes in which she includes herself and Molly. It is a place of solace.
All along, the reader hopes that Molly's eyesight and her doubts will come clear.
Skinner will speak to the annual luncheon, sponsored by the Friends of the Norfolk Public Library, at the Kirn Memorial Library on Saturday, Feb. 24, from noon to 2 p.m. Admission to the event will be $15 and a special price of $12.50 for students and senior citizens. For reservations, call 623-2203 or 489-0909. She speaks with some of the verve with which she writes.
Used to be, novels of agonizing adolescence focused mostly on boys. About 15 years ago there emerged a steady procession of young women in search of themselves.
A pioneering publisher of their stories is Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; and its founder, Louis D. Rubin Jr., also found and aided Margaret Skinner.
``It's a marvelous book,'' Rubin said Thursday. ``It bowled me over.''
Me, too. ILLUSTRATION: Photo of cover
In Margaret Skinner's book, Molly Flanagan is caught in a tug of war
for her soul.
by CNB