WHO DWELT BY A CHURCHYARD

by Barry Fleming ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1988

Fleming, once a master of spirited light fiction (Lucinderella, p. 170) and more recently a writer of ruminative elegies (The Affair at Honey Hill, 1981), has written at 89 a short, slow-moving memory novel about an old man sifting through the dregs of his southern past. Allen Embry, about to move, sits before his fireplace and discards snapshots, letters, etc. after allowing each in turn to stir his richly associative memory. Fleming uses this febrile framework--akin to a man wandering in a ""churchyard among the headstones of your contemporaries if you are an old man""--to tell his story. It's an evocative account, consisting of graduate work in history (a thesis on the Civil War blockade of Ft. Pulaski in Georgia, where Embry's Great-uncle Asa served); marriage to the rich Alice O'Neal, who takes her indigent husband to Europe; romantic intrigue among Embry's circle of military friends at Ft. Pulaski; a long trip to Kentucky, where Alice's family has domestic troubles (her father finally shoots himself); and a biography of Embry's father, an architect who retires late in life to become first a painter and then a kind of farmer. When one narrative sequence runs out of gas, Embry turns away ""from the black andirons to shuffle among the discards for another throwout."" Using his ""wide-angle memory lens,"" he tells us finally about his wayward daughter in Paris and his wife's decline into a kind of invalidism. Fleming's book is a sample of the best and the worst of traditional southern writing: on the one hand, personal and historical memory (particularly of the Civil War) enrich each other, and placetellings are clues to character; on the other hand, the writing can be mannered or eccentric, and the structure arbitrary in its involutions. In short, a melancholic fictional memoir with idiosyncratic southern charm for the patient reader.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Permanent Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1988

Categories: FICTION