Critics' choices for Christmas
Sayers, Valerie
Valerie Sayers Valerie Sayers is professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her latest novel, Brain Fever (Doubleday), was published this year. The best novels I've read this year are...
...Chappell gives the women full voice, and those voices ring with mountain music: now longing, now foot-stomping...
...the pleasures of that genre are considerably heightened by the gracefulness with which Hansen reveals his spiritual hand...
...Tina De Rosa's Paper Fish (Feminist Press, $9.95,157 pp...
...Poetic, exact, and crystalline, the narrator moves through the city and its characters' viewpoints, taking on different accents...
...Sometimes that way is almost beyond imagining...
...These are novels that insist on our interdependence and our need to remember, to mourn, to witness, to celebrate, to sing, to forgive...
...Glancy recounts the bitter cold march in a multitude of voices, Cherokee and white...
...The marchers are not portrayed as a gathering of innocents- several of the narrators sort tortuously through the power struggles that helped bring them to the trail-but the forgiveness and sacrifice of many of the Cherokee are transcendent...
...it is, in fact, a contemporary retelling of the story of the prodigal son...
...this narrative assemblage, which includes scattered bits of the Cherokee language-striking and beautiful on the page-is compelling...
...Each of these novels is structurally intricate...
...The novel is tightly and elegantly constructed as a murder mystery...
...He is unafraid to reveal the sometimes tawdry truth about his characters, and equally unafraid to reveal their tenderness and decency...
...A story of resurrection, then, and in this case resurrection of the publishing as well as the fictional variety: Paper Fish was originally brought out in 1980 by a now-defunct small press, and quickly went out of print...
...Hansen- whose last novel, Mariette in Ecstasy, was a technical marvel-is a master craftsman, but his abiding strength lies in his balance of structure and content...
...how good to hear a variety of American voices telling of the larger worlds, physical and spiritual, in which selves must make their ways...
...it is especially striking that while all four make some use of first-person narrative-that contemporary fictional voice of choice-they all balance the singular, interior voice with outside voices...
...is also about forgiveness...
...Fred Chappell pays homage to a different kind of literary forebear-the storytelling mountain folk of North Carolina-in Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You (Picador USA, $21,228 pp...
...Tart metaphor and dry wit are the basic staples of their stories of tough, brambly mountain women...
...And high time, too, I might add...
...One of the novel's delights is its breezy, straightforward nod to its biblical and literary antecedents: Hansen explicitly confirms that he's reworking the parable, and also acknowledges his debts to To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn...
...Near novel's end, the women join their men for a square dance, and an observer feels that he is "standing near the origins of a strength that helped to animate the world, a power that joined all things together in a pattern that lay just barely beyond the edge of comprehension...
...It is a fine, quirky novel, and its domestic focus does not in any way narrow the themes it explores: identity, passion, sacrifice, forgiveness...
...De Rosa's fictional generosity is such that even God (who, the narrator tells us, is "delighted") makes an appearance...
...How good it is to see novelists of imaginative empathy offering up work whose gaze is outward as well as inward...
...At the heart of the story are a little girl and her Italian grandmother, two fierce and fully realized females...
...Over the past couple of decades we have perfected the self-soaked story, the ever more personal essay (in which we boldly expose the once private sins of our relatives and lovers), and the big-contract memoir...
...We contemporary writers, after all, have been living in the literary age of The Self...
...The storytellers peer into the shadows of their situations-rape, silencing-and move back, somber, to the light...
...Ron Hansen's Atticus (Harper Collins, $22, 247 pp...
...must also construct its own culture-bringing language: the novel takes place in the forties and fifties in Chicago's West Side Italian community, a neighborhood surrounded by a city poised to swallow it...
...This publication marks, I hope, its permanent presence in bookstores...
...The best novels I've read this year are original, surprising, unique creations, but they share one trait: a generosity of voice and vision...
...The storytellers' simple recounting of disease and death, often marked by abbreviated description or sudden silence, stands in stark contrast to the contemporary tendency to melodramatize cultural tragedy...
...The novelist, of course, tries again and again to lay the pattern out...
...is a brave fictional retelling of the Trail of Tears, the nine-hundred-mile journey by thirteen thousand Cherokee forced off their land...
...The plot circles, again and again, the central incident: the child, fearing her retarded sister will be institutionalized, runs away and is lost for three days...
...Chap-pell's vibrant novel combines the urgent, rhythmic evocation of an old woman's death with a young boy's memories of women's stories...
...they belong to the literature of community.ommunity...
...Individual voices struggle to reconcile traditional religious belief and Christian belief with the terrifying reality of the march...
...Diane Glancy's Pushing the Bear (Harcourt Brace, $22, 241 pp...
Vol. 123 • December 1996 • No. 21
