Williams's fifth novel (Slow Dance in Autumn, etc.)—a bittersweet comedy about a man who searches for the woman he loved in the Sixties—is sometimes tedious, but its familiar mix of southern argot and good-ole-boy humor, spiced this time with some religious parody, can also be clever and touching. Ford Clayton is a North Carolina music professor suffering from midlife crisis: wife Jill moves to Macon after he has an affair, and his opera, based on East of Eden, is getting nowhere. Then he sees Camille Malone, the woman he worshipped, in a documentary about the homeless; and, once the story kicks into gear (it takes a while), Ford takes off with cousin Clarence (``I'll just be like your private preacher or something''), who was ``released from prison and washed in the Blood of the Lamb at the same time,'' for Myrtle Beach, where Ford arranges to meet Camille. Interwoven are flashbacks to Ford's childhood (``First and always, there was music'') and to his life with Camille. She was a whiz at almost everything from classical piano to Sixties lit-chat; founded ``The Malone Society'' for ``Philosophico-Musico-Politico Discussion''; organized antiwar rallies; and then found religion. At Myrtle Beach, Camille—still crazy but no bag-lady—founds a new religion with Clarence and later follows Ford back to North Carolina (he becomes reconciled with his wife) to kick off ``The Test and the Text'' (their religion) with a beer rally. It flops— and Camille returns to New York while Ford sets Yeats's ``Lake Isle of Innisfree'' to music, finally achieving something, if only in a minor key. The new religion (``The Book of Mister James Durante,'' ``The Book of Baseball Statistics'') is a lot of fun, and the humor is often right-on: altogether, then, a successful version of the Sixties Novel, about people who yearn to be who they once were but settle for what they have.
Pub Date: May 15, 1991
ISBN: 1-56145-024-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Peachtree
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
A slim novel, both in its emotion and construction, set in 1972, centering on a family coming to grips with the death of a son and the closing of their small town’s factory. The Vietnam War is gradually ending and Watergate is heating up, but these two giant events in US history serve only as backdrop to the personal anguish of the MacLeans. When 18-year-old Cory dies in a summer-job mining accident, the family unravels at the loss of their golden boy—blatantly the favorite son, popular, good, and college bound. Cory’s death leaves a hole in the family that older brother Mike and younger brother Stephan feel compelled, yet unable, to fill. The black sheep of the family, Mike drifts from one low-paying job to the next; after work, he spends his time barroom brawling, or fighting with his bitter father. Stephan, still in school, wants to be a musician, although now, with Cory’s passing, he feels the pressure to take the straight and narrow to college, to live out the life that Cory lost. Add to this the disenchantment of parents Bud and Lola, laid off when the bottle factory closed down, and the tale provides fertile ground for examining the failure of the American Dream. This slow-moving effort, however, just scratches the surface, shifting from one landscape-focused event to another, rarely exploring the emotional terror that lurks within each character. Nieman offers some gemlike observations—the desperation of the town slut, holiday shopping at the local department store, Bud’s frustration at being retrained in computers—but she can—t quite sustain a storyline that refuses to progress. The bleak ending, derived from a lack of resolution, is in a sense admirable, and true to the resignation the characters hold for the future; it also reinforces, though, the lack of movement that defines the rest of the narrative. A potentially powerful work that fails itself through lack of focus.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-9657639-6-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
What happens to hippies who sell out 20 years down the pike? They become the subject of books like this witty debut about aging boomers’ gradual accommodation to reality. Janelle and Tom may not have been the original flower children, but they were certainly on the scene. Married in the late 1960s, both were involved in various antiwar and liberation movements, and for a few weeks they even sheltered two members of a Weathermen-like underground on the lam for killing a Boston cop during a bank robbery. Later on, they wandered across the country, and Tom, while working at a university, eventually learned to program computers. When Janelle gave birth to their son Zak, Tom built a cabin for them in Valdosta, Georgia, where he found work as a computer designer. Life is going along happily for the pair when they are confronted with a ghost from their past in the person of Michael “Angel” Martelli. An old friend from movement days, Angel calls out of the blue asking if he can drop by for a chat; he’s now a lawyer, and it turns out that he’s concerned about Katherine Powers, one of the bank robbers Tom and Janelle sheltered 30 years back. Katherine has decided to turn herself in, and Angel (who arranged for her to stay with Tom and Janelle) is afraid that his name might come up in the case and hurt his career. Janelle promises to say nothing, but inwardly she begins to wonder about the value of all they once believed in. She’s also increasingly distraught over Zak’s imminent departure for college. Has she lost her ideals? Or has she simply put those ideals into private life? Perhaps “the personal is political,” as they used to say, though in a way that Janelle could not have guessed until now. Somewhat rambling and obvious, but told with a fresh voice and infused with a likable spirit: even Young Republicans might be taken in.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-9657639-3-5
Page Count: 230
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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