The First Time Around

...It is fascinating to speculate whether the sensible heroine, finding herself among people who believe in a relentless providence, and realizing that she must herself submit to its verdict, feels some unconfessed affinity for the culture of Ibarra...

...It is, after all, made up of disparate episodes about village catastrophes and celebrations, its characters transfixed in a single frame of mind, a prevailing sin or virtue...

...Stones for Ibarra By Harriet Doerr Viking...

...Tom and Catherine take a trip to Sam's ranch in New Mexico so that Tom can establish filial contact and present his new young wife to his hard-shelled parent...

...All through the rooms were the blending, alternating aromas of sachet-scented bed linens...

...Nothing weakens their tragicomic struggle against superstitious neighbors who arrive, irrepressibly, with sorcerous remedies, bits of thread, a slice of stale bread, a few pinto beans, a thorn placed on a lamp—all reputed to bring health and fortune...

...Sarah is sent to an upper-class Quaker prep school for white girls, and then to Harvard for a B. A. and M.A...

...its main shortcoming is the impatient and pallid images it scatters of a city as animated and comely as Washington...

...The contrapuntal murmur of their opinionated voices among the pots assures the survival of order, of Southern comfort...

...Their heroes went daily from the hearth into the world's business, and the authors were sufficiently engrossed in the latter to put the former into reasonable perspective...

...On this the novel does not commit itself, only spartanly directing us away from the couple's tragedy toward the health and normality they sustain...

...Since July Sara had found that, of these days, even the flaws were indispensable...

...He had to make a voyage to Soviet Armenia to find out something about his forebears, an experience he described in Passage to Ararat, winner of a National Book Award...

...O'Connell is an unusual hero, uneducated but quick-spoken, soft with women, and magnetic at union meetings...

...They divert us, unfold events with aplomb and see their characters as heroes and heroines, not as victims...

...But he and his daughter-in-law (who misses her deceased father) get along as smoothly as a bear and honey...

...It changes the prospects for readers enormously, though, to realize that for the majority of these writers simply having a parent seems to constitute a complete story...

...the child-heroine becomes aware of her mother's betrayal of her father and, enraged, wreaks instant vengeance...

...the family is the world...

...When he figures out who the lady in the dream is (remember, this is a family novel), the therapeutic circle is closed...

...The author's special talent is to summon up, in a few exact phrases, the mood of a place, climate of an emotion, impact of a personality...

...No communication," as William Saroyan used to say, "all the way down the line...

...I Wish This War Were Over By Diana O'Hehir Atheneum...

...Bellicose and self-absorbed, Sam is Hollywood's idea of a Hollywood director, enough of a stock character to fit into the contours of Anthony Quinn or Telly Saval-as without rehearsal...

...The formidably self-possessed 19-year-old heroine sets forth from California to bail her childlike drunkard mother out of the disheveled existence she is leading in Washington, D.C...

...Poetic in disposition, she nevertheless steers her way with the skill of a seasoned politician through dizzifying streams of cousins, next-door neighbors, great-uncles and retainers—bagging a compliment for her beautiful brown eyes here, an extra helping of ice cream or the legacy of a country estate on the river there...

...They have only to turn their backs momentarily on a deserted plain and a man on a mule would have ridden up behind them or a woman with a child settled on a nearby rock...

...The heroine of Sarah Phillips is the daughter of a black Baptist minister in a prosperous suburb of Philadelphia...

...Reviewed by Isa Kapp It must take real courage to write a first novel, to see exactly what one's talent and imagination amount to in black and white, and only an incurable curmudgeon could fail to perk up at the astonishing number of volunteers in 1984...

...Only when he recaptures the cadences of the black speech from which his hero derived his earliest sense of fraternity is Powell's diction precise, his ear perfect...

...11.95...

...Part of the book's charm resides in the pleasure of repair and revival—whitewashing the adobe walls, planting bougainvillea in the bare garden, eventually installing electricity and playing their Mozart records...

...Edisto, by Padgett Powell (also a New Yorker writer), is a happy departure from the plaintive tone of many com-ing-of-age memoirs, and is built squarely upon the pleasure principle...

...It seduces her into many kinds of snobbery...

...In the case of a novelist short on those attributes, it might be advantageous if he did not have the mold and meaning of his emotions predefined for him, and instead had to take on the salutary assignment of working them out for himself...

...a sleazy seduction, tinged with incest, takes place...

...Even in the throes of still another mother-daughter story (and a rather treacly one at that), O'Hehir's touch of levity turns our expectations around...

...of freshly baked biscuits and French-drip coffee in the mornings, gumboes and baked hams and honey-basted plantains at dinnertime...

...Ironically, for the reader, it is precisely the history of an intelligent black girl growing up in an atmosphere of propriety and cultivation, not her impulse toward mutiny, that is engrossing...

...What does come next is Sim's discovery that Taurus is as much his mother's lover as his own special friend, and it is greatly to Powell's credit that he balances the boy's initial dismay with a sequel of gratitude and affection...

...Sim's parents have been separated, and he observes his mother's drinking and promiscuity warily but without reproach...

...Nonetheless, the reader will see from Padgett Powell's surges of overheated prose that a disservice may have been done...

...our current writers nearly always settle for one without the other...

...In view of Arlen's polished prose (the wild, dry Western landscape materializes instantly in those clean, crisp, Nikon images the New Yorker always manages to coax from its contributors), how can the story seem so laughable...

...Indeed, the better part of the book reads as if it were a pre-Civil War idyll, a more literate Gone With the Wind, the mother a Scarlett O'Hara look-alike, capricious, brooding about recapturing the opulence of her childhood...

...14.95...

...Richard continues to be absorbed in working his mine and giving jobs to the townsmen...

...Despite the plot's resorting, as does so much of modern fiction, to a pathological condition as catalyst, there are a number of winning tableaux: the mother decorously serving home-baked cake with burnt berries to her visiting daughter...

...Sarah's parents, active and unpretentious, have no trouble being themselves...

...Author and heroine are marvelously attentive to their natural and human surroundings...

...Oddly enough, this substantial and lively part of the novel, leading us into the work world and its grayish industrial towns like Cumberland, Maryland— where inhabitants stand beside the railroad tracks and watch the trains go by as their main diversion—is actually autobiographical...

...Our major authors have been serious, moral, socially concerned, large-minded—but, to a certain extent, their intellectualization of the novel has drained it of enchantment...

...The language, swerving without warning from countryboy sassiness to adult urban sophistication, is frequently jarring...

...Good friends perish in an airplane crash...

...The last 80 pages of the book grow darker than Greek drama...

...Nevertheless , it surely ranks high above most of the fiction published today and is rich in those magical elements that make reading worthwhile...

...Although Lee takes a transitional step in this direction, she is somewhat awkwardly preoccupied with the posture her heroine ought to assume in any given circumstance...

...Sara makes things bloom and attributes awesome value to each segment of passing time: "And already they had scattered months behind them as if days were nothing more than the feathered seeds of a thistle...

...To be so much a child of privilege is apparently, for a black girl in the '60s, not the easiest of fates...

...Perhaps Freud was able to deal ingeniously with powerful and upsetting impulses because he was unsentimental in mind and circumspect in method...

...Andrea Lee begins the book in Paris, where an expatriate Sarah is living in a swank apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, juggling several bedmates...

...By some remarkable expansiveness of temperament and ambition, the 19th-century novelist contrived to do both...

...The author of this novel about a 39-year-old son's attempt to befriend a father with whom he has had scant rapport is Michael J. Arlen, the New Yorker*s television critic and himself the son of a well-known Anglo-Armenian writer...

...He doesn't even hold a grudge against his didactic mother for surrounding him since his bassinet days with the entire Modern Library collection, early training for the literary profession...

...Her first-person narrative style, dry and laconic (with hidden reserves of lyricism) is adi-rect steal from Humphrey Bogart' s Sam Spade, and may well have been devised to counterbalance the tearful denouement...

...214 pp...

...and a Degas in the first parlor...

...He is obstreperous to his son, goading him into horseback riding over dangerous ditches, interrupting his conversation suddenly to pull up thistles, letting it slip that he was not impelled to finish any of his son's books...

...For the writers of 1984, parents' sins and virtues create the perimeters of emotion...

...But eventually the novelist has to carve some definite figure in this ornate carpet, and she speedily latches on to the line of least literary resistance, introducing the reptile of corruption into the family bosom...

...He wanders over to a black nightclub called Baby Grand and sets up the chrome stands for the drummer, fixes himself crusty hamburgers at 3:30 in the morning, and fishes expertly for mullet...

...Sim is a born appreciator...

...The new novelists reviewed here all envision themselves, I think, to be in the tradition of old-fashioned story-tellers...

...Her pupils adored her, probably because her nature held a touch of the barbarism that all children admire: She would quell misbehavior, for instance, by threatening in a soft, convincing voice to pull off the erring student's ears and fry them for supper...

...of magnolias and camelias, floating in silver bowls in every room...

...Diana O'Hehir has had her first novel published at the age of 62, and by now she is sufficiently relaxed about the creative process to have asked a friend which of her characters should be shot...

...The heroine is an appealing, overre-active nine-year-old, smitten by her handsome well-bred parents...

...She is, in other words, a black American heiress of all the ages...

...Sarah Phillips By Andrea Lee Random House...

...It is written in prose of extraordinary beauty, at a slow, even tempo perfectly accommodated to the strange plateau and ancient Mexican village it describes: "But from the east, where a moment ago was nothing, runs a boy, and, for the first time, the Evertons witness a recurring Mexican phenomenon: the abrupt appearance of human life in an empty landscape...

...We are lucky to have exceptions, such as Eudora Wel-ty and Flannery O' Connor, the Bernard Malamud of the TheMagicBarrel, John Cheever and John Updike when the fates are kind...

...Still, how outof scale it looks compared with its natural appearance in the work of past masters like Tolstoy and Trollope, or in brief masterly episodes of moderns like Philip Roth...

...The school-teacher mother is witty, vigorous and so passionate a gourmet that she notes in her appointment book the date when chocolate-covered strawberries arrive at Wanamak-er...

...Edisto (the name of the tropical, weedy locale) is overdressed for the novel's slim shoulders...

...Its 12-year-old hero leads a charmed life with his mother in a beach house on an island near Savannah...

...Apart from them, the "wonderful story," that mesmeric combination of gifted invention and confident narrative—plus some elusive element, some ineffable knack—has, since the death of Faulkner, become an almost forgotten luxury...

...278 pp...

...The time has come for the black novel to move beyond the recall of poverty and prejudice that has given it distinction up to now, and deal with the challenges in an era of integration...

...In Say Goodbye to Sam, the nearest we get to the need for complication is the narrator's acute case of ambivalence...

...The plot is full of motion: strangers meet, families part, and people's views of one another undergo sudden change...

...by some enj oyed profit and some achieved confidence, rather than coarsened, blurred, sterilized, by ignorance and pain...

...When a beggar lady dies, Sara grieves that she never had the luxury of "a sack of sugar, a goose-down quilt, a long red coat...

...Self-propelled, irascible, decisive, the older generation towers over the young (or middle-aged) narrator, who is totally obsessed with its charisma...

...There will never be a time when we don't succumb to those two pulse-quickening promises of the writer: the first, to tell us a wonderful story...

...The Evertons, a middle-aged couple from San Francisco, sell their home and belongings and come to Ibarra, where they will reopen the mine Richard has inherited from his grandfather and occupy an abandoned old house...

...she turns away from the school cook when he waves at her, and she dreams of ways to scandalize the bourgeoisie—a temptation the author herself cannot quite resist...

...I Wish This War WereOveris corny yet beguiling...

...Into this offbeat household drops an ideal stranger, a process server who has scared away the maid and is promptly conscripted by Sim's mother to drive him to school, polish the brass and provide a surrogate-father presence...

...More beneficial to the child, according to James, would be a purpose "other than that of disconcerting the selfishness of its parents...

...With its several strands of disorderly life percolating at the same time, and its World War II background of crowded trains, V-Day banners and plans held in suspension, I Wish This War Were Over adroitly escapes the confined quarters of fictional innocence and sensibility...

...The uxurious Tom spies Catherine in an array of seductive postures—slipping a clean polo shirt over a bare bosom, face flushed and spirits high as she skips away on a shopping spree with Sam— pseudo-innocent clues, clearly auguring unseemly and shocking events to come...

...That the family should now have become the beginning and end of so many novels is partly atonement for its disintegration in life and literature during the past three decades...

...The book is about the benign influence of this unexpected companion, a man of natural tact and ease of spirit...

...The following passage describes her mother in the classroom: "She had a bright, perverse gaze, accentuated by a slight squint in her left eye, and a quite unusual physical strength...

...the second, to escort us into a part of life we have not had access to...

...The two fish together, watch a boxing match, double date, chat about sex, and breakfast in a Charleston hotel...

...O' Hehir became a CIO organizer when she was still a teenager...

...Picturesque images proliferate: tulle-collared clowns in the Mardi Gras celebration...

...The more emotional episodes, centered on the distrait romantic mother, drinking steadily, always off the mark on the marital intentions of her admirers, are pure invention...

...We are distracted from future gloom by their bantering cross-country love affair, convincing in its cautious momentum and unembarrassed physicality...

...Say Goodbye to Sam knits this sorry predicament into a psychoanalytic romance, with words by Arlen, mood, motive and music by S. Freud...

...The list above is merely a sparse sampling...

...It is set amid the steaming intimacy and hedonism of middle-class New Orleans, and flavored with a rueful nostalgia for lost indulgences: "There were landscapes of George Inness in the dining room...

...Sheila Bosworth conveys the warmth and solidity of life under the entangled branches of the overladen family tree, buttressed by the omnipresence of its black servants, perfumed Sis Honorine and elephant-skinned Viola...

...The father, besides being an eloquent preacher and a prominent figure in the civil rights movement, is humorous, forbearing and unfanatical in his religious beliefs...

...the "Colored Only" bathroom in the Orpheus Theater "that smelled of talcum-powdered sweat and contraband homemade sandwiches," a house with cast-iron balconies flanking a French garden in the old quarter of the city...

...Yet it is not so much these convivial jaunts that touch the boy as the man's outlook, his graceful example, singularly useful to an impressionable 12-year-old, of waiting without apprehension for whatever comes next...

...the small expanding consciousness [of the child] would have to be saved...

...Madre Petra parries with grammatical corrections and questions about Richard's condition, and each moves closer to the truth in this dignified ballet of will, inquisitiveness and genuine empathy...

...His father never spoke Armenian or said a word about the old country to him...

...the daughter putting the debris of underclothes in order, or solicitously reminding her fey parent to button her bathrobe...

...For satisfaction of the mind...

...117 pp...

...And she imagined all around her a sharpening of outline, as when sand is washed from a shell...

...Edisto By Padgett Powell Farrar, Straus, Giroux...

...For Henry James that ending might have been the barest beginning of the process of composition...

...That ability earned much praise for her previous book, Russian Journal, the record of a year at Moscow University with her husband...

...In the book's most delightful chapter, Sara takes lessons in Spanish grammar from a nun every morning...

...When they have been in Ibarra a few months, Richard learns that he is ill with leukemia and has just six more active years to live...

...183 pp...

...As she learns to form sentences, she begins to interrogate the nun about her childhood on a wealthy hacienda...

...In his preface to What Maisie Knew, in which a girl also has to come to terms with her parents' unscrupulous behavior, he says he recognized, once the "ugly facts" were stated, that he would have to add something...

...The most intuitive reader, however, will not be prepared to learn that as Catherine and Sam are getting dangerously enmeshed, Tom, suffering from a recurrent dream of a soft naked lady with long hair, is making love to a chance local acquaintance who resembles her...

...They provoke unquenchable curiosity in the Ibarrans: Each night Reme-dios Acosta presses her shawled head to their windowpane and reports to the village the perplexing conversations and extravagances of the Americans...

...On the train, she runs into an affable middle-aged union organizer, an old boyfriend of her mother's who peppers his conversation with zestful tales of bygone auto strikes...

...Harriet Doerr's Stones for Ibarra won the American Book Award for the best first novel...

...The fictional son, also a successful author, is far less enterprising, periodically sulking that his father "let me down" or "always managed not to be there...

...Sara discourages friendly inquiries, Richard dismisses Sara's concern and, rationalists to the end, they resist well-meant spiritual intervention by Catholics and Baptists alike...

...Of the novels exulting in close familial ties, the most contagious is Sheila Bosworth's Almost Innocent...

...With all the art, concentration and poetic quietude that Harriet Doerr achieves in her first novel at age 74, would it be callous to ask if Stones for Ibarra is indeed a novel...

...The novel then focuses not on the fact of his predicted death but on the almost superhuman discipline and reserve with which the couple anticipates it...