Race-Blind Angst

...Yet for all the cloak and dagger escapes of this technically illegal cabal Keri and Trina travel with for a while, the solution it holds out is not revolutionary...

...In spite of the heavy-duty efforts of a pro who rarely fails to eradicate imperfections, this stain will not come out, rendering the suit commercially worthless...

...This feels like a bit of drama for drama's sake...

...A plan to get Trina to eat healthy and respect her meds, it is certainly no laetrile...

...Here the stories were mostly sad and unfilmable, with a tendency toward running way too long...

...She is bipolar, not she has bipolar disorder...

...You are cancer...

...In this case, Keri runs a flourishing Los Angeles consignment store that puts her on the receiving end of the flash and bling of Beverly Hills Castorfs...

...Campbell's new novel, 72 Hour Hold, plays yet another variation on the theme of an apparently successful woman brought to her knees by well-hidden angst...

...The side-trip gives us a deeper glimpse into what desperation looks like, the sad networkof parents who have come to the end of conventional help and leaped off into the wild blue yonder...

...Your Blues Ain 't (Quite) Like Mine...

...Campbell's first novel...

...And that, admirably, is all the story there is in 72 Hour Hold (the title refers to the length of time one can keep an unwilling adult under medical supervision...

...But 72 Hour Hold is not only a primer in the terrifying race- and classblind basics of bipolar instability...

...Plaintive cries of "Where are you...

...For one thing, "the scariest part" is the way her doctors deal with her...

...What Keri must now confront is not the natural renunciation parents have to practice when their children launch their independence, but the yielding-up of her dreams of the promised future of her perfect child...

...Victims and victimizers went into the pot in a rich, bracing mix, and the outcome was not unrealistically optimistic...

...Keri, desperate to stabilize her child, has plenty of opinions about the way Trina is handled by the mental health system...

...TO all appearances, Campbell gets it right: Trina goes from volatile to uncontrollable, from a fairly typical, occasionally grass-smoking teenager to a dangerously out-of-control paranoid who thinks her mother is trying to kill her, especially whenever she begs a joint and derails her delicate constitution...

...Trina has just, jubilantly, turned 18, but-an awful paradox-the fact that she is now legally an adult gives her the right to refuse to become an in-patient...

...A beautiful and accomplished student readying for her departure for Brown, Trina begins to show the terrifying symptoms of manic depression and gives her mother a chastening lesson in letting go...

...No one can get very far from anyone else, or hide a mood best kept to oneself...

...Her on-again, off-again lover, Orlando, is an affectionate but self-absorbed actor in search of his fading career...

...Consider what a fancy ring tone would do to Hedda Gabler, to Macbeth and Lear (if there were good reception on the heath), and on and on, shredding every plot in its path...

...She may have thought the novel needed a few diversions from its concentration on Trina...

...If Judy were a bird, she'd be a hawk...

...they equated secondhand with poverty...

...Underneath the costumes, however, is the anguished mother of a once ideal daughter named Trina whom we meet as she is joining the small, woefully stricken ranks of adolescents who fall into bipolar mental illness just at the point when they are about to fly from the nest...

...From page one it is clearly an exercise in parental humbling, and that's where it becomes emotionally compelling...

...It concerned the murder in Mississippi of an African American teenager...

...Auctioneers and lawyers were assembled on the veranda...

...There is an attractive, middleclass African American woman at the center of Brothers and Sisters (1994) and Singing in the Comeback Choir (1998...

...She doesn 't have many other places to turn to for help...

...It is a nice grace note in a distinctly minor key resolution...

...Since then, in a series of widely read books, she has narrowed her scope from the broadly social to the individual closer to home,but the ground under her feet is still worthy of excavation...

...The signs were all there: Massa was on his deathbed...

...Susan Sontag would recognize her complaint...

...Thus, Keri is caught between the supposed humaneness of this freedom and the dispiriting attempt to capture her daughter (who runs away every chance she gets) and hold her in place long enough for the effects of her medication to kick in...

...In each, when the going gets tough, roots in family and community are returned to and found sustaining, though these admirable women's relationships with men are a good deal less satisfying...

...Secrets are hard to keep...

...Remember that...

...But word of mouth was working among the sisters, and gradually more and more of them were coming in...

...Their responses, for all their depressions and self-doubt, are feisty and spiced with snappy, self-deprecating, down-home wit...

...Interestingly, aside from the pleasures of Keri's vernacular vivacity, the only difference between a black woman's and a white woman's story of a child's tortuous descent into mental illness and her maternal despair is that, when she feels herself on the edge of defeat, Keri invokes Harriet Tubman as her lodestar-or her North Star-to help keep her steady...

...This way a different kind of madness lies...

...You are aids...

...A character can't even pull the plug...

...Besides the mental health system being shaky, the men in her life are a couple of bricks short of the load she needs to shore up her house...

...This wasn't my first plantation...

...So: If Bebe Moore Campbell were a food, she'd be something healthy...

...author, "Haif a Heart," "Civil Wars" Everyone probably knows the game in which you name someone and then characterize him or her in nonhuman terms: "If Joe were a car, he'd be a Ferrari...

...Perhaps this is what awaits us in the contemporary novel in the age of Nokia...

...She will not win any prizes for literary innovation or gorgeous prose, but she involves and enlightens readers, and has helped to build a library of engaging books about, but not solely for, outwardly successful black women with profound problems at home...

...Campbell adds a few other up-to-date problems to the list of anxious fellow sufferers: Orlando's young son confronting his gayness, and a white coworker trying to escape a past riddled with drug and sex addictions...

...In addition to its painful and knowing portrait of racial politics in the '50s, it revealed the complex ways the legal and media worlds overlapped with the personal...

...Still, who can blame Keri...

...each check-in with its supporting characters conveniently thickens the texture...

...Tubman's daring as the leader of slaves to freedom provides a model of courage, and though this does not seem exactly gratuitous, it is hard not to see it as a trifle de rigueur...

...Nothing, she learns, is promised, andneither virtue nor yearning has much to do with it...

...These equal opportunity challenges make 72 Hour Hold feel rather dutifully relevant, as if Campbell were trying to spread around the angst to remind us we are all vulnerable here...

...Frustrated, Keri embarks on a long, fruitless escape into an elaborate underground of alternative treatment-a bit of a shaggy-dog excursion into hope purveyed not by crazies, not by cruel men or criminals or money-gougers, but by a cohort of earnest ex-fellow sufferers...

...There is a potent symbol of what this proud and slightly boastful mother has lost as she absorbs the realization that her golden child will probably achieve far less than her early promise and, worse, never be free of danger: One of the items brought to Keri's store on consignment is a green suit with a stain on its pocket...

...I could feel the overseer's eyes assessing the value of my flesh, her flesh...

...mistress was crying...

...That is as good a way as any, I think, to describe a popular writer whose work is serious but easy to swallow and digest...

...Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992), was her most ambitious...

...Try to imagine a few of the classics in the era of the cell phone...

...Although we are in Lalaland, "There was no talk of greenlighting or taking a meeting with the producers within the walls of Mental Health Court...

...Which is to say, a good deal of lazy plotting is available to the author of 72 Hour Hold by virtue of dozens of cell phone calls that substitute for scenes designed to bring characters together in actual confrontation or, better, to torture characters with missed connections, the absence of up-to-the-second news, the horrors of not knowing...

...The day Keri wears it to work is the day we recognize that, finally resigned, unwilling to lie to herself, she accepts her daughter's losses, and her own...

...Campbell, whose cross-cultural sociological insight is acute, has a chance to teach her readers a few interesting, if not necessarily surprising, lessons: "Truth be told, more whites bought from me than blacks...

...There goes Romeo and Juliet, whose plot would collapse with a couple of the instant messages teens love so dearly...

...She can be calmed by her meds but, of course, she will do anything she can to avoid them...

...In the psych ward: "Something bad was going to happen...

...So the leitmotif of the underground railroad serves to remind us that her characters have their particular identity, not to be entirely equated with white folks' pain...

...The story in Campbell's new novel is less dependent on a race-specific situation and setting than those of her previous works...

...I closed this book grateful to stop the clangor of endless proxy explanations of the ongoing drama...

...Buying resale required a mental adjustment for black women...

...The ingredients are exactly what intelligent though hardly "literary" readers find comforting, not because Campbell strains for happy endings-her view of the problems is too nuanced for thatbut because her characters (all better looking and better dressed than most of us) resonate with familiar and realistic detail...

...Deep South, that's where I was headed What I needed was a swamp and a star...

...repeated and repeated, will just accumulate in the mailbox and if not answered, will have to be erased...

...These are earnest, goodhearted sisters who keep on keepin' on...

...Her ex-husband, Clyde, has morphed into a reactionary talk show host who can't seem to concentrate long enough on anyone except himself and a succession of unhappy wives to believe, in spite of Keri's pleas, in the seriousness of his daughter's descent into hell...

...filling and delicious, not candy or meat and potatoes...

...A small but amusing irritation: Having begun this review with one game, I can't resist finishing with another...