SOUTH OF REASON

A likable and earnest debut, 1960s-set, about an adolescent coming to terms with her troubled family.

Small Texas towns weren’t all as desolate 40 years ago as the one in The Last Picture Show, but they were usually close-knit and somewhat claustrophobic. Kayla Sanders thought tiny Cameron was remote enough—until her family moved to Rosalita, where her father grew up. There, all at once, she finds herself in the thick of some ancient scandal that hovers over her parents, and that no one seems willing to acknowledge. For one thing, everyone (especially her father) is horrified that her mother insisted on buying a house next door to Lou Jean Perry, a single mother with two sons. But what’s so strange about that? Lou Jean is somewhat odd, true enough, but she is a childhood friend of Kayla’s father and her son Charles Dale, at 13, is exactly the same age as Kayla. Soon, however, Kayla’s mother starts bringing Charles Dale to family functions with them, and Kayla’s father reluctantly takes the boy to various father-son outings. It’s true that poor Charles Dale has no father of his own, but then neither does his brother David, who is rarely the center of such attention. In time, Lou Jean’s eccentricities (e.g., washing her hands fifty times a day) become so pronounced that she is carted off to Glenwood Falls Mental Hospital, and both of the boys come to live with the Sanders family. Kayla is old enough to understand that sex has entered the picture here and is lurking in some unusual corner, but she's confused by her mother’s motives: Is this an extreme form of Christian charity, or something else altogether? At 13, it’s easy to misread your parents’ virtues as vices—and vice versa.

The atmosphere of mystery is not sustained very well (the real nature of the situation is obvious early on), but, still, this is a fine portrait of adolescent confusion and small-town anxiety, narrated with a fine, light touch.