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Where's the Beach?
| Article
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19678 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
621 Words |
| Author
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Monroe K. Spears
Monroe K. Spears is the author of American Ambitions, Dionysus
and the City, and The Poetry of W.H. Auden. He was editor of
the Sewanee Review from 1952 to 1961 and retired in 1986 as
Moody Professor of English at Rice University. |
Rising very early in the morning to do his writing while he continues to work full-time as head of Agricultural Communications at the University of Georgia, Philip Lee Williams has produced five novels. He lives in Athens with his wife and son, and in 1990 he was named Georgia Author of the Year for The Song of Daniel. The Heart of a Distant Forest, his first novel, won the Townsend Prize, and was followed by Slow Dance in Autumn, a detective story set in the Atlanta underworld. All the Western Stars (1988), describing the escape of two elderly inmates from a nursing home to Texas to fulfill their childhood dreams of becoming cowboys, has been optioned for film production. His new novel, Perfect Timing, set in a music conservatory in Asheville (with excursions to Myrtle Beach and a small town in Georgia), gives full scope to his love for and knowledge of music.
Perfect Timing is very attractive on the surface, up to date in all respects, with racy and entertaining dialogue. But it tries to do so many different things that its success is limited. It is partly an academic novel, but attempts simultaneously to be a "sixties novel": the narrator, Ford, re-reads letters from his great love of twenty years ago as he tries to find her in the present, and reinterprets his past experience in terms of present reality. To bring together the romantic vision of Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and the satiric wit of Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, or Alison Lurie sounds like a great idea, but the ingredients won't mix. What emerges is a comic quest paralleling the Odyssey as the straying husband returns to his faithful Penelope.
The narrator's search for a religious meaning in his midlife crisis is reminiscent of Walker Percy, but in his novel it is embodied in Clarence, the grotesque ex-convict turned preacher, and Camille, the former sixties radical, who join forces finally in a preposterous crusade. Camille (whose name suggests La Traviata and Garbo's movie) is the femme fatale or Belle Dame sans Merci and the apostle of Romantic Art; she is revealed first as the victim of incestuous child abuse and at last as really crazy. Clarence finally gives up his preaching to become a yard man. Neither of them ever really represents a possible alternative. So the deck is stacked, the end predetermined. Clarence (one of the most boring characters I have ever encountered) seems a dim gesture toward a Flannery O'Connor grotesque, but is merely silly and meaningless where hers--the Misfit, for example--are both funny and terrifying. Camille is a composite of all intense, intellectually aggressive or politically committed women from George Sand to Maud Gonne to Laura Riding, with perhaps a distant echo of Scarlett
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