BEAR ME SAFELY OVER

National Magazine Award–nominee Joseph’s first novel, through a murky plethora of viewpoints, finds a way to tell about a couple of clans of Greene County, Georgia, young people battling more or less successfully for love.

Sidra Ballard is more interested in horses—riding, cleaning, and stabling them—than in learning why her boyfriend-turned-fiancé, Curtis, loathes his flagrantly sexy and far-too-wise-for-his-teenaged-years stepbrother, Paul. Through alternating points of view, each character is revealed facet by facet: for example, one gains from a girlfriend observer that Sidra rejected joining a born-again church because it condemned heavy-metal music, the very kind that Curtis plays in his band. Sidra’s younger sister Marcy, meanwhile, who discovers heartbreaking adventure every week by running away from home to new cities, eventually contracts AIDS from needle sharing. Curtis’s lead guitarist, Kent, falls for the sinewy and sexy boy-child, Paul, thereupon incurring Curtis’s infantile wrath, but nevertheless also saving the young man from further delinquency. Around these main protagonists toil tertiary voices, such as that of young, ambitionless mail-carrier Lyle, who saves a neighbor’s choking baby in spite of his bumbling ineptitude and finds himself a local hero. Where is author Joseph, a 2001 Pushcart finalist, going with these meandering narrative shreds? Proceeding in understated, cautious prose and without clear purpose, her debut only eventually settles its sympathies on the young and gay Paul, who, after being arrested for prostitution, is welcomed into Sidra and her mother’s home so that, removed from small-town bigotry and embracing true love with guitarist Kent, he can embark on a new life. By this time, though, it’s too late for redirection of the rudderless novel—or for re-engagement of the weary reader.

Many small tales, nicely wrought, fail to assume a larger cohesion.