THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 17, 1996 TAG: 9603150393
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY EUGENE M. MCAVOY
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
ANSWERS TO LUCKY
HOWARD OWEN
HarperCollins. 214 pp. $22.
A 20-year-old who is not a liberal has no heart, and a 40-year-old who is not a conservative has no mind. So the old joke and conventional wisdom claim. In Answers to Lucky, Howard Owen destroys this bit of folklore - and a good deal of Southern literary tradition with it.
No stranger to the South or to Southern fiction, Owen grew up in Fayetteville, N.C., and now lives outside Richmond, where he is deputy managing editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
His previous novels, Fat Lightning and Littlejohn, have been critically and commercially successful. As is the blessing and bane of many Southern writers, he has frequently been compared to William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. But in his third novel, Owen leaves the need for such comparisons behind and discovers his own voice.
That voice comes from the novel's thoughtful and liberal protagonist, Jack Dempsey Sweatt, nicknamed Lucky after narrowly escaping death in a childhood accident. The novel details 46-year-old Lucky's travels through North Carolina as the personal chauffeur to his twin brother, Thomas Edison Sweatt, during the 1992 North Carolina gubernatorial campaign.
As he watches Tom Ed, the Republican nominee, sink deeper and deeper into the muck of Southern politics, Lucky examines how the past has shaped him. More important, he explores the forces that have separated him from his brother and led them to different stations in life.
Repressing his fantasy of becoming the prodigal son, Lucky discovers answers to his questions that paradoxically draw him closer to his brother and make that closeness no longer so important.
Once inseparable, Lucky and Tom Ed grew apart after Lucky contracted polio and was abandoned emotionally by his father. As Tom Ed ferociously sought the trappings of success and an only son's favor, Lucky drifted deeper into himself and away from his brother. Finally, on the evening of President Kennedy's assassination, Lucky broke free from his star-struck brother and emotionally impoverished father and began a life that seldom led back home - until the campaign.
Owen explores dangerous territory in this novel - the relationships between brothers and between fathers and sons. But it proves fertile ground. The novel often approaches intense honesty without becoming maudlin or sentimental.
In language as simple as his characters, Owen prods into the crevices of guilt and blame and creates a character rare in modern fiction: a man who accepts responsibility for his life and his actions. Refreshingly original and comfortably familiar, Answers to Lucky asks few simple questions and accepts no easy answers. It is insightful and painful and as true as fiction gets.
Though generally well-written, the novel does suffer from a few minor flaws. First is the near-stereotypical representation of Lucky's father Tom, a man with a fifth-grade education and an overwhelming desire to have his sons succeed where the rest of his ``white trash'' family has failed. He is at once an overbearing father to Tom Ed and an absent father to Lucky, the embodiment of all paternal sin.
Equally damaging are the predictable and often irrelevant biographical sketches that accompany each character's entrance into the narrative and an inconsistent voice that shifts confusingly between the present and past tenses. In a lesser novel, these transgressions would prove unforgivable. Here, they are mere irritations.
Despite its weaknesses, Answers to Lucky remains an entertaining glimpse into Southern politics and an enlightening examination of a man who refuses to conform to conventional wisdom. It offers a new wisdom with which to view the South and announces the arrival of a powerful and compassionate voice in Southern literature. MEMO: Eugene McAvoy is a writer who lives in Norfolk. by CNB