THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 5, 1996 TAG: 9605030744
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MARI LONANO
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
LANA WITT
Scribner. 416 pp. $22.
In the town of Pick, Ky., population 900, five characters play out a story of lust, love, coal mining and revenge. The time is the present, and the characters are not all alive.
In many Southern novels, there is a character with a skeleton in his or her past. In Slow Dancing on Dinosaur Bones, there is a made-out-of-bones skeleton in the present. But coal is the dinosaur bones of the title.
Gilman Lee, an iconoclastic bon vivant who has lived his entire life in Pick, suddenly finds himself challenged by the Conroy Coal Co., which has come to town to buy land leases from poor people. Gilman is the only person who refuses to lease his land. For the first time in his life, he fights for something other than bourbon and women.
Not that he couldn't have his pick of the women in Pick. For Gilman has that je ne sais quoi that women in his mountain county love. As head of the Gilman Lee Machine Shop Society, he hosts a Saturday night gathering that includes most of the town's men, and many of the women. They drink, sing and play guitars. On Sundays they go to church and nurse their hangovers.
Gilman has quite a few characters to keep him company: There's Ten-Fifteen, so named because his deformed arms protrude at 10:15 clock time. And Rosalee who has returned to Pick after escaping from an abusive lover. And Zack, Gilman Lee's best friend, who has been dead for years; Gemma Collet, a beautiful 30-year-old who suffers from vitiligo and is completely white; and Tom Jett, a philosopher from California who has landed in Pick either by chance or by fate.
Slow Dancing on Dinosaur Bones works because of its eccentric characters, its thick tension, good writing and Mr. Gilman Lee, the novel's center.
Lana Witt, who lives in San Diego, but was raised in eastern Kentucky, has written a funny, passionate and earthy novel about people's continual search for something or someone to hold onto.
Gilman feels his age coming on. Gemma, who is finally coming into her own, can't decide between Gilman and philosopher Tom Jett. Rosalee tries to understand what drew her to the psychotic Frank Denton besides his black eyes. Ten-Fifteen dotes on Gilman and in turn, is doted on by everyone. And Zack the skeleton simply won't go away.
In the final analysis, Witt tells us: ``Something and nothing are the same thing.'' MEMO: Mari LoNano, a poet, teaches English at Norfolk Academy and lives in
Norfolk. by CNB