DATE: Sunday, September 21, 1997            TAG: 9709110863

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY JULIE HALE 

                                            LENGTH:   92 lines

CAPTURING THE SOUTH'S SPIRIT

NEWS OF THE SPIRIT

LEE SMITH

Putnam. 267 pp. $23.95.

In Lee Smith's latest crop of stories, News of the Spirit, there is a housekeeper whose name is Gladiola Rolette. There are characters called Dallas and Luther, Lena and Lulu, and a dog named Muddy Waters. Who else but Lee Smith could cast a book with a bunch like this and still come up with serious, soul-probing fiction?

Smith has been transforming the lowbrow into high art for nearly 30 years with her earthy sense of humor, and her gift for capturing the language and spirit of life below the Mason-Dixon line. From Oral History's Hoot Owl Holler to the Grand Ole Opry in The Devil's Dream, she has explored both the rural and the cityfied South. Like her forebears William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, she has helped make the South a legitimate place in the geography of modern literature.

Smith, who is 53, grew up in Grundy, Va., and much of the action in News of the Spirit occurs in her home state. Each story in this collection is filled with warmth and wit, and each displays the author's remarkable ability to inhabit the minds of her female characters. Smith gets every word, mood and move just right. Exploring the psyches of Southern women has long been her specialty, and it is just this sort of mental immersion that makes News of the Spirit such convincing fiction. These are stories about stories, in which the power of memories is as strong as religion, and past events make the best plotlines.

Charlene Christian, narrator of ``The Bubba Story,'' remembers the days when she was an aspiring writer disenchanted with her own life. In order to stir things up at the small women's college she attended, Charlene created a fictional brother named Bubba around whom she wove many a tall tale.

``The Bubba Story'' flashes back to the 1960s, as Charlene whiles away that wildest of decades at college, and the life of her fictional sibling takes on mythical proportions. Bubba is a poet, a thief, a writer of folk songs. ``My creativity knew no bounds when it came to Bubba,'' Charlene says, ``but I was a dismal failure in my first writing class.'' Like all of us, she wonders, ``Wouldn't anything ever happen to me?'' It is just a matter of time before Charlene has unforgettable adventures of her own - with her English professor, Dr. Pierce.

Unlike Charlene, Alice Scully, the elderly narrator of ``The Happy Memories Club,'' has no problem recognizing the wild mystery of her own life. Alice, the feistiest character in the book, causes an uproar in her retirement-home writing group by refusing to compose stories based on happy memories alone. What Alice writes is more painful and poignant - the truth. Her memories are beautiful: On summer nights, as children, she and her sister sneak out of the house and lie down on the highway that leads to Baltimore, feeling the warmth of the sun the road holds, and dreaming of the places the blacktop path could take them.

``Sometimes we nearly dozed on that warm road - and once we were almost killed by a potato truck,'' Alice writes. At the end of her life, through the power of stories, she discovers the ``voice too long silent inside me, the voice of myself.''

From feisty Alice to Chanel Keen in ``The Southern Cross,'' Smith writes convincingly about a variety of women. A kittenish character who has changed her name from the more mundane Mayruth, Chanel is ``Upwardly mobile'': ``Mama always said, `Talk real sweet and you can have whatever you want.' This is true, though it does not hurt to have a nice bust either.'' That Chanel has survived on bits of homespun wisdom like this explains how she ends up where we find her in this story - on a yacht in the Caribbean with a group of unsavory men. Among them is Larry, who has ``psychologically'' left his marriage, and whom Chanel claims as her fiance.

The details in ``The Southern Cross'' - and in the rest of News of the Spirit - are so perfect that citizens of the South will smile in recognition. Chanel's mother cooks soup beans in an elementary school cafeteria in Paradise, Ky. Her sister, Darnell, ``goes to church in a mall where she plays tambourine and dances all around.''

As usual, Smith's female characters are full of cheek and sass. There are nervous, high-strung, tippling mothers and cocky adolescents who ask too many questions. Jennifer, the narrator of ``Live Bottomless,'' flashes back to 1958, when she was a bike-riding ``spy'' of 13, and collected stories in a spiral notebook. (This might describe a younger Lee Smith.) The too-inquisitive Jennifer discovers more than she should about her parents' dissolving marriage. On a family trip to that capital of quirkiness, Key West, Fla., she tries to cure their ailing relationship. What unfolds is a gem of a story that is the best in the book.

News of the Spirit is Lee Smith's third collection of stories. These pieces flow with the power and poignancy of memory itself. For Smith, when the shadow of the past falls on the present, story and life intersect. News of the Spirit is a perfect blending of both. MEMO: Julie Hale is a writer who lives in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Lee Smith

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