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The Lost and the Found
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10486 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1993 |
2,077 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 NAMES OF THE LOST
Liza Weiland
Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1992
312 pp., $19.95
In Wim Winders' film Wings of Desire an angel descends upon Berlin to eavesdrop on the minds of the city's troubled souls. Their secret thoughts take voice, swelling into a plaintive chorus of sorrows, losses, hopes, and desires. Liza Wieland's Names of the Lost similarly provides an "angelic" vantage point from which to listen to the voiced thoughts of a city's inhabitations. The voices--nine in all--arise from Atlanta in the summer of 1980, and each reveals the inner workings of a mind through first-person narration. Though Wieland situates her characters in the South, this is a land of suburbs and backyard swimming pools, not the older South of uniqueness and particularity. In Wieland's South, place does not determine destiny. She does not aim to explore a specific time and place in naturalistic fashion; rather, she seeks to glimpse the mysteries that lurk beneath placid surfaces, to touch the poetic heart of the prosaic, and to spy out the extraordinary that filters through the curtain of mundanity.
The italicized prologue that precedes the speaking of the voices illuminates the way in which Wieland moves from the reality of surfaces to an inner (or perhaps "supra") reality. It begins with a deceptively banal sentence "Girls like to go swimming at night" and ends a couple of pages later with an eerie evocation of the black children whose deaths give a surreal edge to life in Atlanta in the summer of 1980. "You'll hear them tonight, singing up out of the kudzu, singing high and lonesome in this Georgia darkness, crying for their mommas. In the morning, your grass is trampled and their tears are everywhere."
Although the characters all know one another, and are drawn even closer by the murders that dominate the news, they speak individually by turns, as if a fundamental isolation defies the reach of connectedness, and each person responds in his own separate way to the horror that has engulfed the city. Noreen, one of the three eighteen-year-old girls who swims at night (in the pool in her backyard), prays and fasts, beseeching Saint Christopher to "carry these heavy children across the river." Her friend Augusta ("Gus") compiles a list of the missing children, noting beside each entry the child's age, address, parents' names, and when the body was found. Elijah, a black teenager who loses both his best friend and his younger brother, Buddy, to what he calls "The Snatcher," longs to
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