DATE: Sunday, October 5, 1997               TAG: 9710020682

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY LYNN DEAN HUNTER 

                                            LENGTH:   71 lines

BRINGING A RURAL WORLD INTO FOCUS

WHEN TROUBLE SLEEPS

CLYDE EDGERTON

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 280 pp. $18.95.

``Stephen was beginning to get some idea about who was going to hell and who was going to heaven. His mama and daddy and aunts and uncles were pretty clear. Terry's daddy - Mr. Daniels - was pretty clear: He was going to hell for getting drunk and yelling and beating up Mrs. Daniels. Mrs. Daniels was going to hell for drinking wine.''

Clyde Edgerton's new novel, Where Trouble Sleeps, portrays the growing-up of a young boy in the days between two summer rainstorms. Seated on the porch of his uncle's store, Stephen Toomey observes the moral landscape of Listre, a blinker-light crossroads town in North Carolina. He's 6 1/2; he's just been taken to see the electric chair (a cautionary field trip); and good and evil are much on his mind:

``He, Stephen, would go to hell if he didn't accept Jesus, something he was getting old enough to figure out to do. His mother said he was old enough. The preacher did, too. A lot of it - getting saved - had to do with visiting old people and going to church every time you were supposed to, cutting off the Blaine sisters' toenails, and things like that for old people.''

Where Trouble Sleeps is the sixth of Edgerton's novels set in Listre, a fictionalized version of his own rural North Carolina hometown, Bethesda. Much of Edgerton's material is drawn from his childhood. Characters in Listre talk pure Tar Heel. Their concerns - good and evil, temptation, the fleshly pleasures - are universal:

``. . . And not drinking beer and whiskey. And it (getting saved) had to do with not saying ugly words, not touching stinky, keeping your pants on, keeping quiet when you were supposed to, not running away from your mama, not playing with your doodie, eating what you were supposed to eat, drinking milk, and being quiet, and it definitely had to do with Moses, Jesus, Peter, Mary, Zacchaeus, Issac, God, Joseph, Abraham, David, Adam, Ezekiel, Miriam, and not playing in the mud.''

As Stephen puzzles over right and wrong, a tempter comes to Listre in the form of a con man, Jack Umstead. Umstead arrives in a stolen Buick, manufactures a background for himself, and plans a big heist. Day by day, Umstead seeks out those whom he can tempt: the kissable waitress with movie-star dreams; the young mother left alone too much; the shut-in church secretary who has charge of the preacher's discretionary fund. Edgerton's deftly shifting narration lets the reader inside the hearts and minds of all these tempted souls.

Even the low-speed Lucifer, Umstead (a k a Rusty Smith, Delbert Harris and Delbert Jones), is rendered with compassion. A stew of conflicting urges, Umstead meets his match in Listre, a town he has made a moral, as well as actual, crossroads.

Raised in a Southern Baptist tobacco-farming family, Edgerton received a bachelor's degree and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served five years as an Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War. Edgerton has taught extensively, most recently at Saint Andrews College in Laurinburg, N.C., Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Duke University, and Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., where he shared the Eudora Welty Chair in Southern Studies with his wife, writer Susan Ketchin.

Edgerton's seven novels include Walking Across Egypt, The Floatplane Notebooks and Redeye, a Western. A film version of his first novel, Raney, is soon to be released. In 1997, he received the North Carolina Award for Literature. MEMO: Lynn Dean Hunter is a short-story writer and poet and associate

fiction editor of ``The Crescent Review.'' She lives in Virginia Beach. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Clyde Edgerton

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