Southern Discomfort

...Her blurred worldview, whether due to myopia or tears, allows her to substitute imagination for action...

...Scully has mastered the art of building narrative momentum, and her wit enlivens every page...

...In periods of trouble she reaches for her rosary...

...Holes, holes or alump, rotting at the base of a cave...

...Although the stock market Crash pulls the floor out from under them, Scully insulates her characters from the other social tensions of their day, especially race...

...They shift the tone of the writing from the elegantly conventional to the nonsensically experimental...

...She has been angry at the world since her daughter was named for her against her wishes...

...The author is capable of plumbing the rich strangeness of familial love, but these unnecessary flourishes are disruptively bizarre...

...Regina delightedly admires "the china and Charles, both of which were flattered by the candlelight," but soon notices the first dimming of the marital glow—"Sleeping was heaven...

...She is slipping on the tiles which cut blood, and pasting along with the breeze she tries to signal him with her mind, watching the red hourglasses on the backs of the black widows, suspended inside their fragile silver halves...

...Regina's older brothers, an indistinguishable quartet, as lazy and puerile as they are well-tailored, tilt the balance of the novel a little too far toward comedy...

...THE END of the gaiety the Riant name implies is heralded by the Colonel's death shortly before Regina's wedding...

...As the novel opens, Regina Riant, the spoiled only daughter of one of the city's richest men, is newly wed to Charles Morrow, an up-and-comer who is more fragile than he appears...

...In their childish antics and drunken tumbles, the brothers are neither a Greek chorus nor court jesters, and Scully's enthusiasm fortheir silliness and impotence dilutes the potency of her work...

...His 20-year-old bride is fully aware of her own charms and possesses a sharper mind than most of her peers, though she is too self-involved to make much use of it...

...The attempts to impart Regina with a fantasy life are jarring...

...They fail to mature, even when their world collapses around them...

...In hardly gentle times she clings to the conventions of gentility...

...The Colonel's insistence betrayed an obsession...

...Scully's account of the first weeks of their marriage is both tender and wry...

...At first they embody the prosperity of the past and the presumed future: "The sound of locomotives blending with the lapping of Mobile Bay seemed to accompany them as they entered a room...

...She was sick of it...

...She knows how to tell a story, however, and she will surely have many more to tell...

...Regina's character is compelling not for being likeable, but because her weaknesses make her seem familiarly human...

...prayer and trust, she believes, will see her through—"happiness breeds faith" and, apparently, vice versa...

...his first wife was called Regina as well: "Why did he love the name so much...

...Regina's brand of religion is equally passive...

...Her bad eyesight "made things look more pleasant than they actually were," yet when faced with unvarnished reality she invariably breaks down in tears...

...They believed the stock market was a perfect forum for such a test...

...His profligate philanthropy is unappreciated only by his rigidly punctilious wife, Mother Riant, a consummate killjoy "dimly aware that she would rather be her husband than herself...

...Still, as Scully writes, "Personality is a trait that makes for rare bursts of color in the long, thin branches of the family tree...

...She showers them with luxuries—mohair-lined coats, sandalwood soaps, a red felt billiard table— but the dawning realization that they are "too precious for hard work" makes her ill...

...Regina is Scully's most complex, and most successful, creation: part Pollyanna, part drama queen...

...Exactly how that is so proves difficult to divine...

...I try not to say things that will ring later on...

...The strongest sections of Scully's novel are scenes of tautly controlled drama, but she often interrupts them to indulge Regina in unfortunate flights of fancy...

...Having presented her callow but basically well-meaning heroine, Scully backtracks to sketch the rest of the Riants with similarly satirical affection...

...His departure from Mobile sends her into a fever dream: "With a metal pole she fishes out his black and white head from the center of the pool while he rides bareback on a zebra in a purple velvet suit...

...It sounded medical and made her think red...

...I don't want these words to be ringing in our heads later on," she tells her defiant daughter during an argument...

...Nevertheless, she perseveres, hits bottom, pushes off, and improbably rises...

...Their personalities teeter between pathos and parody...

...Though not yet 30, Helen Scully spins an authentic tale across a 20-year spectrum of experiences that encompasses young love, motherhood, domestic disappointment, and senility...

...But their penchant for echoing each other, for speaking in clichés, for avoiding anything that might be construed as work, reveals them as oversize infants...

...There is little nobility in this decline...

...Its heaviness, the sound of it put a thickness in her throat...

...A brief affair with an exotic Chinese scientist before her marriage leaves Regina shaken...

...Mother Riant pours her energy into the cultivation of her four sons...

...In her own mind she is always a heroine, though when grave troubles occur her usual conclusion—something will work out—is hardly heroic...

...With two Reginas to envy...

...But, the brothers reasoned, because the size of their risk corresponded to their faith in God, God would employ His steady hand to make sure they stayed even...

...It was also something they could watch from afar, like a sporting event...

...She effortlessly renders the details of life in a Catholic household in Mobile, Alabama—hair tonic, dress patterns, the flowers lining the driveway—after World War I. The Riants' dreams and disappointments are conveyed with grace, humor, and a lushness verging on the febrile...

...Also problematic is Scully's handling of Catholicism...

...the cast of/« the Hope of Rising Again is too hapless to raise the story to the level of tragedy...

...From there her years become a slow, relentless downward spiral marked by a miscarriage, a fire, the fatal illness of her son, Charles' suicide, Mother Riant's creeping dementia, and finally the Crash of 1929...

...They compare each others' "tongues, thumbs and knees" on the wedding night...

...But that asset also steers her too often toward caricature, and as a result her novel lacks the nuanced textures of more mature chroniclers of Southern life, like Shirley Ann Grau...

...Regina's father, the Colonel, is universally beloved in Mobile, "all the time buying meals for the prostitutes along the docks, helping old Negro women across the street, giving candy to children, and flattering ladies' hats...

...Reviewed by Janice P. Nimura Contributor, Washington "Post Book World," New York "Times Book Review" This debut novel plays out the traditional cycle of the Southern saga: A wealthy and eccentric family is struck by misfortune, dissipates, and eventually achieves redemption—observed all the while by its long-suffering black help as the "fat and old and loathsome" sun beats down oppressively...

...To the brothers God seems to be a game: "They would demonstrate their faith in God by casting their fortunes in the hand of fate, where they would have no one to blame but chance...

...her one black character, Camilla, the family housekeeper, is a sternly benevolent stereotype...

...Her title and section headings ("The Father," "The Son," "The Holy Ghost") signal that faith is key to the Riants' future...

...Later, sunk in grief after the deaths of husband and son, Regina is seized by nightmares: "Her body a ball tumbling down an uneven slope, her daughters balls from her hole with holes themselves: the vagina...

...As her family slides into ruin she grows deaf and helpless, venting her frustrated rage by flinging chicken bones and dinner rolls at her grown boys...

...In the end the salvation she and her brothers find turns out to be more material than spiritual...

...being awake with him at times annoyed her...

...A "strict diet of avocadoes, applesauce, catfish, and mashed potatoes" is prescribed, and her sons' snickers punctuate her maternal disappointment...