Books F-8 The Orlando Sentinel, Sunday, March 8, 1992 Exploring mystery of a happy family Hope in midst of despair A down-and-out journalist finds he still has his soul in 'Love -Y i Fortunate Lives By Robb Forman Dew William Morrow, $20, hardcover, 285 pages Reviewed by Nancy Pate SENTINEL BOOK CRITIC literal-minded, humorless Netta Breckenridge, a young visiting professor with a broken marriage and a small daughter, Anna Tyson. Netta plops down her problems and Anna Tyson at jthe Howells' kitchen table and hardly ever budges. Her manipulative presence upsets the family's summer rituals and routines, arousing tempers, tensions and misunderstandings. In chapters that could stand alone as artful short stories, Dew glides from one character's viewpoint to another, showing the slow yet inevitable evolution of that mysterious creature known asj a family. The novel is redolent of summer sensations the whir of fans in sticky heat, the cool, empty halls of the college, sun-warmed tomatoes from the garden, white wrought-iron chairs under the willows.
Equally con-vincing is Dew's evocation of the emotional undercurrents of the most mundane events, from Dinah pondering Da-vid's still- empty college n-w 1 i HIT UCT Robb Forman Dew made her debut as a novelist in 1982 with the luminous Dale Loves Sophie to Death, in which she chronicled one summer in the life of a 30ish couple, Martin and Dinah Howells, as Dinah and their three small children spent the vacation months in Dinah's Ohio hometown. Now, with Fortunate Lives as rich and accomplished as its predecessor Dew revisits the Howells family during a summer 10 years later. This time, they are their comfortable home in a small Massachusetts town in the Berkshires, where Martin teaches at the local college and edits a literary magazine. Dinah looks after the house and the children the eldest, David, will enter Harvard in the fall, while 13-year-old Sarah has turned into what an acquaintance terms "another one of those gorgeous Howells children." But the Howells' life is not unshadowed. Middle son Toby was killed in a car accident six years ago; his death still laps at the corners of their consciousness.
Martin never has really let Toby go, although he tells himself that he has accepted his son's death, even going so far as to hire as his summer assistant Owen Croft, the college student responsible for the wreck. Meanwhile, Dinah's apprehension about David leaving home exacerbates her own sorrow over Toby, and David's new aloofness from his family doesn't help. "What was haunting her was the memory of the condition of unqualified, unguarded, untentative goodwill between her and her children. She remembered the assuredness even when they were in the midst of some furious argument of unconditional love. She had thought there would always be an enduring conspiracy among herself and her children in the face of the world." The world also has intruded on the Howells in the personage of Love Obits By John Ed Bradley Henry Holt, $21.95, hardcover, 276 pages Reviewed by William McKeen SPECIAL TO THE SENTINEL Joseph Burke is drifting.
He was once on the fast track through the newsroom of the The Washington Herald, but now he is D.C.'s newest has-been. Burke, the protagonist of John Ed Bradley's new novel, Love Obits, has worked his way through the sports, lifestyle and magazine staffs until an ill-timed affair with a senator's wife leads to a reduction-in-rank by the newspaper's legendary editor, Cameron Yates. Now Joseph travels among the dead; he writes obituaries. He is joined by another newspaper sinner, Alfred Giddings III, former Pulitzer Prize winner and world's oldest male virgin. Giddings was guilty of lusting for the wrong woman, Yates' mistress on the staff.
So the dictatorial editor busted him too. Joseph is determined to get out not necessarily out of Death Row (the pet name for the newspaper's obituary desk) but out of his lethargy. He needs to discover some way to enjoy his life again. So he moves home. Not such a good idea.
His father, Woody, was paralyzed in the accident that killed Joseph's mother. Now, months later, Woody has fallen in love with his nurse, who is married. It isn't a particularly good example for Joseph to follow. The one hope for recharging his heart is Laura Vannoy. She's the widow of one of Joseph's obits, a wealthy and rakish restaurateur who rescued the much-younger failed southern belle Laurie Jane from obscurity and made her a star on the D.C.
social circuit. Lauria had been out-of-love with BOOK JACKET DETAIL is a man of tremendous courage. The novel revels in the comedy and cruelty of the newspaper business. Joseph, exiled to Death Row, is treated like a leper by some of his former colleagues. Yates, the hard-drinking, hard-cussing editor may be America's most famous editor, but he is a sad*stic and vindictive villain above no pettiness.
We come to see that Joseph Burke is too good for that particular world. That is his problem. He still has a soul, and it thwarts his advancement at the newspaper. Bradley uses Washington well its well-known bars, its characters, its monuments. And he uses it well as a symbol of the nation's ailments.
Washington's well-documented problems are also on display: the paradox of the homeless in the home of the brave. Love Obits is a rare newspaper novel. Out of the inherent inbred cynicism of that genre, Bradley has birthed a novel that finds hope in the midst of despair. From his Death (Row) sentence, Joseph Burke learns how to live again. William McKeen teaches journalism at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
her husband for years before his death. Now here comes an obit writer, a startlingly handsome young man licking his wounds, obviously in need of nurturing. But will he accept her intentions? Love Obits is a surprising book. At first, you expect a self-indulgent Jay Mclnerny '90s novel of booze and bleary eyes, transferred to the nation's capital. This book has some of those elements.
But Bradley's characters aren't cardboard. Joseph Burke surprises us; Alfred Giddings delights us; and Laura Vannoy seduces us. It takes the suicide of his former lover the senator's wife to kick Joseph into action and force him to take stock. Suddenly, he realizes nothing can be taken for granted, nothing can be assumed. It drives him home and he learns again to love his father.
Woody has been grieving for Joseph's mother, but not in the way that Joseph wants. Joseph's standard for his father and for his colleagues and his lovers has been too high, he comes to realize. He finally learns to accept his father as he is. And in the end, he sees that his father irunK 10 martin walking the dog up a hill. "The scene was comforting and familiar, yet, in the tremendous clarity of the day, the world splayed out before him seemed fragile, as if it were contained in an overturned porcelain teacup." Fortunate Lives stands on its own as a complete and rewarding novel.
But read in company with Dale Loves Sophie to Death, it exerts some of the same fascination as Michael Apted's series of 7 Up documentary films, in which he has visited a group of English children at seven-year intervals in their lives, taking them from elementary school to adulthood. One is amazed at the ways in which they've changed and the ways in which they've not. At any rate, to viewers, they're instantly recognizable. And so it is with the Howells. Thanks to Dew, we know them well and can't help but wonder where fortune will find them 10 years from now.
History of Bill of Rights is history of liberty Nancy Pate BETWEEN THE LINES Classics teach kids that reading is fun I spent a recent rainy weekend in the company of two preschoolers, one of whom's favorite phrase is "Read dis!" I was happy to oblige, although both my voice and enthusiasm were beginning to fade after the 10th or 12th rereading of Is Your Mama a Llama? And I couldn't help but look forward to the time a few years down the road when we could share something a little more challenging, some fairy tales or Aesop's Fables, maybe even a little Homer. Don't laugh. Reading motivator Jim Trelease, author of the best-selling The New Read-Aloud Handbook (Penguin, notes that one of the most important aspects of reading aloud to children is to communicate that reading is fun. If the grown-up who is doing the reading is bored, then kids will pick up on this lack of interest and begin to think of reading as yet another chore. "You have to make the pleasure connection," says Trelease, who will be in Orlando Tuesday to speak to parents in a program sponsored by Partners in Learning.
Trelease's thoughts are echoed by educator William F. Russell, who writes the Family Learning column that appears weekly in The Orlando Sentinel's Thursday Style section and who is the author of the recently reissued Classics to Read Aloud to Your Children (Crown, $9, paperback). This anthology includes selections from classic works of literature by authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens, works that Russell believes "will be interesting for children to hear and parents to read." The selections are grouped in three categories: Listening Level I for children ages 5 and up, Level II for ages 8 and up, and Level III, ages 11 and up. Russell also includes a section of story poems and holiday stories. He writes in his introduction that while the vocabulary in the selections is beyond the reading vocabulary of many children, it is not beyond their "listening" vocabulary.
At the beginning of each selection, Russell supplies a brief introduction, the approximate amount of time it will take to read the story aloud and a pronunciation and vocabulary guide to unfamiliar words. The story of "Androcles and the Lion" from Aesop's Fables, for example, takes about 5 minutes to read, Androcles is pronounced "ANN-droe-kleez" and a "coliseum (kahl-uh-SEE-um)" is "a large stadium." The tale is included in the Listening Level I section, where the selections from an excerpt from Anna Sewell's Black Beauty to Homer's story of Ulysses and the Cyclops are typically brief and appeal to a child's sense of wonder. Here, too, is where you'll find the story of how Arthur was crowned king, of Don Quixote jousting with windmills and of Robin Hood's meeting with a merry little old woman. The stories in Level II are filled with adventure and humor. The section begins with the whitewashing episode from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and also includes a narrative retelling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Washington living's "Rip Van Winkle." (Irving also is represented in the holiday favorites section by his Halloween tale, "The Legend of Sleepy Level III selections, which are a little longer, include excerpts from Jack London's Coil of tlte Wild and the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Speckled Band." In a blurb on the back of Classics to Read Aloud, Trelease writes that Russell has done a great service not only to children, parents and teachers "but to great literature as well.
He proves there is an access road to the classics that can be enjoyably traveled by 5-year-olds and 35-year-olds." I'll vouch for that. And speaking of roads, I was glad to see Russell has included one of my own read-aloud favorites from childhood, Alfred Noyes' poem "The Highwayman." Once upon a time I said "Read dis" so many times in regard to it that I still know much of the poem by heart, especially the refrain: "And the highwayman came riding Riding riding The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door." Jim Trelease will speak at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the First United Methodist Church, 142 E. Jackson Orlando. Tickets, available at tie door, are $6.
sive education; the New Deal and the Red jeopardy and self-incrimination, speedy fact, the Bill of Rights was created to appease the founding fathers, who were convinced that the Constitution gave too much power to the federal government and neglected the personal rights of private citizens. While the authors admit that the Bill of Rights is not perfect (for instance, it does nothing to redress the injustice inflicted by and impartial trials, trial by jury, and cruel and unusual punishment. But it was the Bill of Rights, and its expansion into further Constitutional guarantees, that has been brought home to us on the front page of the daily newspaper, and the cover story of national magazines, for more than 150 vears. -M A People's Charter gives us not merely a thumbnail sketch, but broad swatches of detailed historical analysis concerning matters so important, and originally so inflammatory, as slavery and its demise, the rise and dominance of labor or- Scare; minority rights, women's rights, religious rights, artists' rights; and what the authors term the Global Bill of Human Rights that is transforming our planet at this very moment. And all of it, as the authors have indeed proven, can be traced to the Bill of Rights and the magic of our democratic government that allows power to be taken from the people and then given back to them to meet the challenges of each succeeding generation.
While the authors' tribute to American democracy and personal rights is not unalloyed they see vividly the fragmentation in our society along lines of wealth, age, class, race, sex, gender, ethnicity and education it is unarguable that in America, and thanks mainly to the Bill of Rights, people have the opportunity to learn, create and excel in whatever field or form of endeavor that they choose; to live their lives in quiet harmony with each other; and to be shielded from the potential abuses of an arbitrary or capricious government. Orlando attorney Sam A. Mackie teaches legal affairs at the University of Central Florida. the Constitution upon slaves, American Indians, or women), and that it took many years for our federal Constitutional system to settle into its lasting form, they write that the depth, profundity and flexibility of the Bill of Rights would probably i i ,1 A People's Charter. The Pursuit of Rights in America By James MacGregor Burns and Stewart Burns Albert A.
Knopf, $30, hardcover, 577 pages Reviewed by Sam A. Mackie SPECIAL TO THE SENTINEL James MacGregor Burns has won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and he has been a celebrated American historian for nearly 40 years. His son, Stewart Burns, is a college professor and social historian who appears to be following his father's footsteps. Their first collaborative effort, A People's Charter: The Pursuit of Rights in America, describes the history of the most important personal liberties that we enjoy as individuals in this country. The "People's Charter" is the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the federal Constitution.
Although the authors trace these liberty guarantees from the Decalogue covenants, to the Magna Charta, and through the English and French social philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, our Bill of Rights has as much a political as a moral and philosophical foundation. In A' nave siameu us uc- ators. James Burns Many people know the Bill of Rights from the freedoms of speech, religion, press and assembly that are embodied in the Constitution's First Amendment. Most of us also have some knowledge of the protections that the Bill of Rights affords against unreasonable searches and seizures, double suffrage, desegregation Stewart Burns and legalized abortion. Overall, the authors' scholarship and eloquence in recounting the stories embodied in the development of our most important individual rights, and the social revolutions that these rights engendered, are truly admirable.
Here, too, are the chronicles of progres- ally finding a perfect, platonic mate in Clare, a woman in her late 30s. Then, several years later, Bobby comes to the city and moves in with Jonathan and Clare, who takes him as her lover and becomes pregnant. In haphazard fashion, the three wind up in upstate New York in an old farmhouse, raising baby Rebecca and running a cafe. Overshadowing even love in the lives of Cunningham's deeply realized characters is the mystery and impulse of family. Jonathan and Bobby and Clare not only are incomplete as individuals but also in any combination as a couple.
As a family, though, they have a chance to discover their own true selves; their very dependence on one another in a precarious world leads to awakening independence. HEADING TOWARD TRAGEDY Damage, by Josephine Hart (IvyBallantine, Hart's first novel about the nightmare of obsessive love seduces with the elegance of its language and its sustained tone of menace. The nameless narrator, a respected doctor and established politician, tells how he becomes sexually obsessed with black-haired, enigmatic Anna, his son Martyrs girlfriend. Even as Anna responds to the narrator's passion, she insists she is a "damaged" person who is going to marry Martyn so as to lead a "normal" life. How much damage will she and the narrator do? The question propels the story toward tragedy.
These fine first novels now are available in paperback: GRAPPLING WITH THE AMERICAN DREAM Typical American, by Gish Jen (PlumePenguin, $9): In a story both gloriously funny and heartbreaking, Jen chronicles the lives of Chinese immigrants grappling with the American Dream. Ralph Chang arrives in New York in 1947 to study engineering, runs into visa trouble and eventually is rescued from loneliness and confusion when he accidentally bumps into his older sister, Theresa, in a park. He later marries Theresa's best friend from Shanghai, romantic but resourceful Helen, and the three set up housekeeping. The Changs have children, prosper and move to the suburbs, where Ralph's academic career is sidetracked by a fried chicken franchise and Theresa has an affair with a married man. Life overtakes them and almost pulls them under.
Dreams change. The rich story is buoyed throughout by the energetic lilt of Jen's writing, the wise certainty of her vision. DEPENDENCE LEADS TO INDEPENDENCE A Home at the End of the World, by Michael Cunningham (Bantam, Jonathan and Clare and Bobby are not your usual menage a trois. No, the relationship of these three lost souls is more complex. Growing up in Cleveland, Jonathan and Bobby are best friends and teen-age lovers.
After high school, Jonathan escapes to New York, eventu iwwnfM NANCY PATE.
