Fiction
Family history
Barbara Trapido
Love-Act M. E. Austen (Jonathan Cape £6.50)
T ohn Crowley's Little, Big is a curious, J captivating fantasy which rambles through six generations of a family in their greenery-yallery New England country house, The book is a delight for anyone with the leisure to meander through its charmed, close-printed 538 pages: a kind of midsummer night's dream which carries the reader along by the opiate of its beautiful prose and its deft knack of leaving one with one foot in dreamland and the other firmly in the here and now. The novel is full of wandering men and creaking gates, winding stairs and damsels who appear at upstairs windows like prisoners in towers, or up ap- ple trees holding lighted candles. Yet these same women munch peanut butter sand- wiches, tie up their shirts under their breasts and get pregnant by dubious village theosophists. Similarly, the Arthurian men work as clerks in New York City, or at ar- chitects' benches designing Cluniac skyscrapers for millionaires with a fondness for the gothic. Even the visionary Aunt Cloud strikes matches on her shoe. On the crackpot level there is Grandfather Trout, but he comes trailing such profound and uneasy hints at a human past — such a wistful compound of reincarnation and frog-prince witchery — that his valialY goes undisputed. Or the aged Mrs Underhill, who appears with aplomb in de- fiance of geography or chronology, shawl and rocker intact, beating the cat with a knitting needle drawn from behind her ear and mumbling oracular prophesies. The book is sometimes like a happy if unlikely marriage of De La Mare and Joyce. Here Is the boozy priest marrying the once invisible Smoky to his tall witchy betrothed with a distinctly Joyceian prose joke: Do you Barbie take this Daily Alice to be your awful wedded life for bed or for worse insiduous in stealth for witch or for poor or to have unto whole until death do you part ... And now you pounce you man and wife.
My favourite character is Auberon of the one eyebrow, a 'rationalist' among `gnomic fanciers'. The book is so erudite yet so elegantly light, so rich in implication, lit one can do no more than touch upon t charms of its Beaux Arts dreamland. One has heard it said that bad novels can make good sociology. Eudora WelrYcsi novel makes it apparent that rather Pa, , ones can sometimes make good soela" history. As the Renfro/Vaughn fatal' chronicle with gusto their unremarkable daily lives from the porch of their newly tin roofed house in Boone County, the reane., picks up all the evocative cultural imager' of the region. The reconditioned Coca Cola truck looms large in the drama, as does ill time-honoured tension between patrons and owner of the local trading store. Tliere,, is the Better Friendship Methodist Church and the rival Damascus Church, started Grandpa Vaughn. Local election rivalry is here too. Uncle Homer's election poster lists 'lifelong Baptist' among his many qualifications, which appear indented, 'like a poem on a tombstone.' The ferry has stopped running Sundays, ever since Uncle Joe Wisdom got religion. The family almost speaks in tongues, moved, as it were, by the Sperrit. Miss Beulah rises from her chair as if against her will. 'I'm going right ahead and tell it' she says. And the preacher's job is to send one home quaking. The writing is so scrupulously close up that one smells the very vinegar in which Granny's best lace collar has been washed.
The narrative device is a simple one. The family has gathered in annual reunion to celebrate Granny's 90th birthday. Aunt Cleo, who is newly married into the clan, having only recently answered Uncle Noah's advertisement for a white Christian lady, doesn't know the family mythology and plays at once audience and devil's ad- vocate. The small town drama is skilfully orchestrated as Jack, the much admired, swash-buckling older son lets it be known that he has jumped jail to be there on Gran- nY's birthday. He has all the vulnerable heroism of the uneducated folk hero- outlaw and in order not to disappoint his family he prepares to enact a show of vengeance against the judge who sentenced him. Only his new wife is against it. The Poignant and fragile nature of Jack's rela- tionship with his wife Gloria, as she strug- gles to divert him from the well-meaning but destructive effects of his family's ad- miration constitutes the underlying theme of the book. One small gripe: there are oc- casions, as at the very beginning, when the author's voice is too schoolmarmishly thick With simile. Can the old Ford really have looked, 'like a black tea kettle', or the school bus, 'like Noah's Ark', or the can- vas, 'like the walls of Jericho'?
John Wynne's first novel is a disturbing and well written book. An impressive work for those with strong stomachs. Its genre is tvlanhatten lumpen gothic and the imagery of its terrain, crab-lice and vomit, pro- stitutes, rape and Yamahas. Or as Stewart, the destructive mechanic, puts it, 'You can flick everybody over and they won't say shit.' It wanders through psychopathic dreams of electrocuted babies and brothels with one-legged tarts, but the book has a compelling and terrible beauty. It tells the story of a photographer who has an affair with a sado-masochistic girl until the Photographer moves on into the suburbs and the girl becomes the victim once again. 11 this landscape of violence and perversion a child astronomer gives a talk on the birth Of stars. 'The universe is not a peaceful place', comments the scientist from Colum- bia University, 'but a violently active I found M. E. Austen's book, also about 4 Prostitute, disappointing by contrast. Its
mysterious characters, the call girl and her
"Ysterious client (who makes her enact a series of scripted dialogues until she begins to identify with the girl in the script), are two-dimensional and not in themselves in- teresting enough to sustain the book in its tantalising promise of surrealist conun- drums.
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