An Innocent's Journey
BROWN, ROSELLEN
An Innocent's Journey All the Finest Girls By Alexandra Styron Little, Brown. 259 pp. $23.95. Reviewed by Rosellen Brown Author, "Haifa Heart," "Street Games" It has been said—many times,...
...The reader so quickly understands what only slowly dawns on Addy that we need to be certain the writer who has made her knows at every moment, and far more deeply than the character does, how very ignorant her desperation has made her...
...In this case the wedge is a funeral...
...Where was mine...
...Addy naively asks Derek, the less friendly of Lou's sons "Why do you hate me so much...
...Thus Tom Jones...
...And—as the Caribbean children's song suggests in the epigraph, "Fiolé-e, femme, fiolé, /Women gone away...
...Every tool," he said, "is a wedge...
...Perfect observations leap off the page: "I breathed in the lavender and the polite perspirey top note of ladies' tennis...
...Addy, furious at being chastised, bellowed "NIGGER...
...Conversely, a character impelled by any number of forces, from boredom to a crisis in a distant place, goes forth into the world and discovers complexities undreamedof at home...
...That's what matters...
...All the Finest Girls is a good deal more interesting than its generic situation, though it frustrates by dealing superficially with some of the serious questions it so skillfully raises...
...Mom says...
...Reviewed by Rosellen Brown Author, "Haifa Heart," "Street Games" It has been said—many times, as a comfort to would-be writers fearful of having nothing new to offer—that there are only seven plots in the world...
...For me, there were no distinctions...
...thus Siila...
...My parents pretended to, but they were just going through the motions...
...We were meant to grieve together...
...Now Lou, who had been "as familiar as my own thumb" but is long gone from Addy's life, has died in St...
...What must be bome home to her before she can begin to grow up is that, her kindness notwithstanding, Lou's life was only incidentally connected to hers...
...Lou came upon them and chased away "yah nasty boy...
...Addy Abraham, a rather shy restorer of paintings for a New York museum in her late 30s, has had the mixed—mostly bad—fortune tobe the daughter of an especially feckless couple: Her mother is a narcissistic, neglectful movie actress, and her father is an equally self-absorbed Leftist professor and writer...
...Always's fremblin' about," Lou's sister Marva says of the timid young visitor...
...Lacunae like the absence of a response to the shouted "?-word," and Addy's barely abated self-pity even in the face of all she's learned of Lou's losses, kept me, reluctantly, from being convinced...
...Asked why she has come to Lou's funeral, Addy replies, "Because I thought it might help...
...All this is absolutely—well, almost absolutely—true, from Addy's self-serving point of view...
...The news breaks upon her like a giant wave .Lou had left her sons—not solely, as it turns out, for the economic reasons that drive people to emigrate without their families, hut in part because of the wreck of her long love affair with the boys' father...
...Me don't give a shit about yah...
...So much for the self-professed adoration of this "daughter" who saw no racial differences...
...In All the Finest Girls, Alexandra Styron's debut novel, the second type holds: An innocent ventures where she would never, in her quiet life, have gone, and what she sees and learns unsettles as well as colors her sense of self , not to mention her most intense memories...
...Jesus jumpin' Judas...
...someone arrives or something happens to shatter it...
...Is she yet again blind to the wreckage she has caused, handing her daughter off to "the help...
...at her...
...She a real fenky-fenky...
...The more astonished Addy is by self-evident epiphanies, the clearer I wanted to be that Styron did not consider them as stunning, or as deeply transforming, as Addy did...
...But there are problems with this demiresolution...
...When the novel opens, Addy, swamped with fond and grateful recollections, is en route to her funeral...
...It's enough to love...
...Clair, but she finds herself at the wake that is really a celebratory party for Lou...
...When Mom offhandedly tries the old "You were a daughter to her," letting herself off the hook, Addy is able to say "No, I wasn't...
...All the finest girls"—the story concerns two women who must leave their homes, though under hugely different circumstances...
...I looked beyond Lou's skin color, her accent, everything that made her different...
...Intercutting scenes from Addy's emotionally parched childhood, Styron gives the reader a rich introduction to the West Indian culture that sometimes overwhelms and frightens the sheltered Addy, andjust as often thrills her with its warmth, its music and food, and the charm of its language...
...Yah don't ask why, yah just do" So blessed, Addy goes home to the mother who has caused her so much pain...
...Though we recognize that Addy's whole belated journey has been from innocence to the beginning of experience, this racist reflex, because it is never ackowledged or examined either by her or by Styron, leaves a huge rock in the road to honesty that the author blithely steps around...
...Which bring to mind a statement once made by a friend of mine, a woodworker, that stunned me with its reductive power...
...But more than that, she saw me, like no one else had ever done...
...That's why I was there...
...Yah tink yah were special...
...But the best of these are sensory observations...
...Well, you loved her, Ad...
...What, if anything, do such easy words mean when one's own distracted mother says them...
...But whether or not seven is the magic number, it is a fact that, very broadly speaking and with some exceptions, there are only two structural models for novels: The status quo is established...
...Me know...
...There the same Derek pronounces to the crowd (not to the uptight white girl) that "it doesn't matter if yah are loved...
...Clair, her Caribbean home...
...Surely this is the most common problem in fiction whose characters indiet themselves, however plausibly...
...Me gwana tell yah something, OK...
...I'll be curious to see if she can develop a clearer, more penetrating gaze and the distance to separate the hard truths she knows from those her characters are only beginning to guess at...
...And I, because I was special in her eyes, saw her...
...West Indian Lou is the sometimes stern, sometimes sympathetic, always attentive surrogate for Addy'sout-to-perpetual-lunch-and-cocktails parents...
...Treated her just like one of yah own, after she gwan and wipe yah uptight white ass for a couple of years...
...With such a psychological and political tin ear that her casual cruelty set this reader's teeth on edge, she insists to Lou's grown sons that their mother would always say, "You my white daughta...
...In a voice "pregnant with rage," he tells her calmly: ? do not hate yah...
...Fah true you are !" Here is where Styron's book is most complex and problematic: "Finally, walking between Derek and Philip, I felt I belonged...
...Thus Anna Karenina...
...That may not be a compliment, but it is a more colorful set of epithets than Addy is going to hear in her own neighborhood, and she is bold enough to appreciate that...
...These men and I were siblings, truly, united at last...
...I was the one who really got it...
...Yah black mother...
...Lou had, after all, been a mother to me too...
...Like so many parent-starved poor little rich girls, she would undoubtedly have succumbed to emotional malnutritionhaditnotbeenforLoUjherwarm, wise, blackhousekeeper...
...A fresh thought, unforeseen, stings me like a spray of gravel to my face...
...Like to dead a person fi' fear...
...This actually seems a few too many to me...
...Like she loved yah and oh, ain't it sweet how yah loved her so much...
...If she doesn't quite exonerate her, at least she begins to come to some kind of terms with her...
...Or does she possess some wisdom she has never displayed in her own relationships...
...Addy is gentle and a little patronizing, as if she were the mother and her mother the small child...
...Deeply stung, Addy prepares to leave St...
...There are other, lesser irritants—for example, the slightly forced mystery of Lou's death by drowning and the possible culpability of her ex-lover Errol—but they are merely distractions...
...Styron has set up a little echo of Derek's hard-won benediction...
...No tourist, Addy has come to pay homage to the woman she calls her "black mother...
...Need, undiminished, bleeds from this young woman without let...
...She loved...
...For one thing, it fails to address a disturbing incident that took place when Addy was quite young and avidly accepting the advances of an '"unacceptable" local boy...
...Yah proud of yahself, right...
...Even after recognizing that Lou's real concerns were with the family she could bring to Connecticut only by way of photographs, Addy—still stunted by her parents' profound neglect—cries out, "Lou had had a life...
...The larger implications of her story are somewhat stinted...
...It is at this point, of course, that the fine paradox of the seven plots and two structures kicks in: As with any convention, whatever value a story has is altogether a function of what it contains of particularity, believability and, finally, emotional power...
...But it is never quite clear who is the unspoken object of the help...
...Another familiar move...
...We have seen her before, a thousand times...
...She will later describe the affluent Connecticut household she grew up in as "love-handicapped...
...thus MobyDick...
...In the end, the real disappointment is that Addy's innocence sometimes seems her own and sometimes her creator's...
...In spite of that, and of the wavering of Addy's voice from the confidential to the distantly factual whenever she has to summarize her characters' offstage histories, the deftness of the local color and the haunting details of never-to-be-outgrown pain are promises of good things to come for Alexandra Styron...
Vol. 84 • May 2001 • No. 3
