THE CABAL

The Cabal is a group of wealthy, influential residents of Jackson, Mississippi, who share the same shrink.  When poet Caroline Jones arrives in town to teach at the college, she's thrust into the thick of it by attending the funeral of the Cabal's most prominent member, stage director and unqualified "Presence" Jean Lyles.  A confrontation between Jean's young lover and her middle-aged, greedy sons is defused by the psychiatrist, Jim Jaspers, whose own wild behavior is a portent of disaster.  After the funeral he gets even wilder, to the point that his clients worry he'll start spilling their nasty secrets.  Soon Caroline is enlisted to help the rebellious daughter of another Cabal member and finds herself hot to trot with Jean's bereaved lover.  Meanwhile, Jim is announcing to all that he's privy to the secrets of the universe, and powerful figures across the state are preparing to put him away, one way or another.  In "The Sanguine Blood of Men," Caroline appears, pre-Jackson, as a frustrated screenwriter in San Francisco, fending off a pass from her would-be producer and sharing a house with a cousin she had looked up to since childhood.  "Hearts of Dixie" portrays Jean's occasional typist, a depressed pro tennis player to whom she has entrusted a safe-deposit box full of frank letters to her family, never sent, and a pile of Krugerrands, with no instructions.  And "The Big Cleanup" records the further adventures of Miss Crystal and Traceleen, for whom a makeover is the first step to solving their problems and everyone else's. 

Easy, lively reading, with some affecting moments, but mostly these tales have all the substance of a plateful of bonbons.