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Man-taming Granny
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11246 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1993 |
1,922 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. |
CHARMS FOR THE EASY LIFE
Kaye Gibbons
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1993
254 pp., $19.95
No more of Tammy Wynette's "Stand by your man because after all he's just a man and can't help it." These women are fed up and fightin' mad. "I'd take a poison pill before I'd take a man," Charlie Kate snaps. Disgusted with boozers, loafers, and skirt chasers, Kaye Gibbons' women--Charlie Kate and her daughter and granddaughter, Sophia and Margaret--would just as lief do without--unless, that is, a perfect man should happen to show up.
Gibbons depicts these women through the memories of Margaret, who reflects upon her childhood in the 1930s and the two women who kept it in an exhilarating uproar. She begins with family lore passed down by her grandmother, stories that reach back to the turn of the century and Charlie Kate's wooing and marrying, and the move from Pasquotank County to Raleigh in 1910. Margaret's recollections culminate with the momentous events of 1942: her first romance, Sophia's remarriage, and Charlie Kate's death at the age of sixty. She interweaves three strands of the past: Charlie Kate's career as midwife, herb doctor, and unlicensed general practitioner; the comings and goings of men in the women's lives; and a girl's entry into womanhood in a Raleigh absorbed with global war. Wherever Margaret's memories wander, they always return to Charlie Kate, the dominant figure in Charms for the Easy Life. "She took up quite a bit of room in one's life," Margaret remarks.
This is Kaye Gibbons' fourth novel in six years, and the accolades these books have collected have made her a serious contender in the contest to select the next queen of southern letters, a title previously enjoyed by such luminaries as Ellen Glasgow, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welt, Gibbons' success should brighten those who despair over popular fiction. Charms for the Easy Life evidences none of the trashiness, cheap thrills, and triviality that afflict so many novels that reach the best-seller list. It features no sexual high jinks, no blood-curdling mayhem--not even the usual inventory of foul language. It is a serious book, carefully crafted and gracefully written, and its protagonist evinces the forcefulness and vitality that make a novel stick in the mind. Charms for the Easy Life might qualify as an example of the "moral fiction" that John Gardner called for back in the 1970s.
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