THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 6, 1996 TAG: 9610070184
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LYNN DEAN HUNTER
LENGTH: 70 lines
CAROLINA MOON
JILL McCORKLE
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 260 pp. $18.95
Jill McCorkle's fifth novel, Carolina Moon, is remarkable. Interlacing six characters' narratives, letters and a taped diary, she develops a portrait of two generations of love and loss in Fulton, N.C., complete with clandestine meetings, mysterious deaths and an occasional touch of gruesome comedy. (A dead body in the new load of topsoil? By rights, shouldn't the next load be free?)
Named among the best young American novelists by Granta Magazine in 1996, McCorkle has been a rising star among Southern fiction writers since her debut in 1984, when she published The Cheerleader and July 7th.
Over the next six years, she wrote two more novels, Ferris Beach and Tending to Virginia. A short-story collection, Crash Diet, won the New England Booksellers Award in 1993. Her books are Southern in their concerns, often gathering generations of women, showing the weight of their pasts, and the wisdom they pass on.
But, never mind the old Southern Lady stereotypes. Women in McCorkle's South are modern. They work, speak their minds, and they hold some values that would make Scarlett O'Hara blush.
At the center of Carolina Moon is Quee - Queen Mary Stutts Purdy - a wild, dynamic widow who starts her own business: ``Smoke Out Signals,'' a smoking-cessation clinic where the slogan is ``Put Your Butt Out and Bring Your Butt In'' and the technique is complete pampering, with sauna, massage therapy, talk therapy, gourmet meals and fine wines.
As befits a queen, Quee dabbles in the lives of her customers, knows their secrets and tries to bring each one a better life. Within her kingdom, she sometimes plays God:
``Did I ever tell you that I sometimes feel too powerful for words? It's not something you really go around spouting.
``I remember the first time I ever felt that way I was a child and sitting way up under our house . . . I could stand on my knees as an eight-year-old and still not hit my head on the rough boards of the foundation and plumbing. It was my world and it made me feel powerful . . .
``I remember thinking that this is what God must feel as he sits back and does nothing while sirens sound and cars honk, people scream. . . ''
Most of the time, though, she is a mistress of illusion: Look into the mirror that makes you seem skinny, she tells her people, no matter how much weight you gained when you stopped smoking.
Quee lines a wall with photographs of strangers, whom she gives ``lives and appetites, sex and dreams.'' She calls it her ghost wall of orphans' collected souls. Each person opens to her ``like a window or a door, an unknown world waiting on the other side. There's not a single one without some semblance of goodness, some form of redemption.''
Although McCorkle, a native of Lumberton, N.C., now lives in New England with her husband and two children, her writing remains Southern in setting, language and issues. So much so that she was invited to represent Southern writing at the 100th birthday celebration of the Suffolk Literary Club in 1994, where she read aloud from the manuscript of Carolina Moon, then a work-in-progress. The new novel was taking much longer to write, she told her audience, because she was, by then, raising two young children. Computer time was a lost luxury. Six years in the writing, Carolina Moon was written with pen and paper, in between diaper calls and during naptimes.
Technically magnificent, Carolina Moon transcends simple categories. It is a tender book about power and redemption. A romance, a mystery, a tragedy, a confession. A tour de force. MEMO: Lynn Dean Hunter is a writer and associate fiction editor of The
Crescent Review. She lives in Virginia Beach. by CNB