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The Children Are Watching
| Article
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20677 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1992 |
3,072 Words |
| Author
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James Thompson
James Thompson, who lives in Nashville, is the author of
several books, the most recent of which is The Church, the
South and the Future. |
THE PAST LEADS A LIFE OF ITS OWN
Wayne Fields
New York: Poseidon Press, 1992
264 pp., $20.00
AT WEDDINGS AND WAKES
Alice McDermott
New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992
213 pp., $20.00
In his book of short shories, The Past Leads a Life of Its Own, Wayne Fields re-creates, through memory and imagination, the world of his boyhood: the farms and small towns of northeastern Missouri and western Illinois in the decade after the Second World War. Alice McDermott, in her novel At Weddings and Wakes, evokes the streets of Brooklyn and the suburban lawns of Long Island in the early 1960s. The writers' techniques are worlds apart: Fields employs straightforward narrative, whereas McDermott pursues a more devious route. Her comment in an interview with Publishers Weekly underscores the difference between her method and that of a writer like Fields: "Straight, realistic narrative seems to leave something out for me; I like the puzzle of it, the game of putting things together in unusual ways that somehow, I hope, come together."
Dissimilarities of technique and setting deceive to some degree, for closer inspection reveals that Fields and McDermott have much in common. Public events rarely intrude upon the lives of their characters. Both writers explore instead the intricate pattern of quotidian existence---the routine events, familiar occurrences, and workaday dramas that lend shape and meaning to life. Through his protagonist, a boy named Lonnie, Fields explores the child's angle of vision, a perspective McDermott manages deftly through the three Dailey children. Both authors evince a finely tuned sensitivity to the apprehension and wonderment with which children launch their early steps on the journey into knowledge and experience. Along this way nothing bulks larger than the mystery of death, an enigma that lies at the heart of Fields' stories and McDermott's novel.
Confronting death compels one to contemplate something equally mysterious: life. In The Past Leads a Life of Its Own, Lonnie soaks up the lore of nature as he pokes about the fields, streams, and woods that form the physical contours of his world. Fields accurately describes rural sights and sounds, everything from "silvers of scum ice" fringing a creek in March to the "raspy
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