Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 24, 1994 TAG: 9407170067
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by DABNEY STUART
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Very little "happens" in "Life Estates" - the consummation of a love affair, the death of a close friend.
It is more a novel about how life becomes those who live it, how the dying cling to life and seek the best of themselves to remember at the end. Rather than move from point A to point B, "Life Estates" rotates around a center, viewing aspects of Sarah Cooper's past, growing slowly into richness and complexity, discovering that life points toward nothing but itself.
Shelby Hearon is also concerned with how the names we invent for situations fail to do justice to them. The names for a woman - widow, divorcee - define her in terms of marriage, not in terms of herself. There is much talk of how marriage (not necessarily husbands) is a "pen," and we see how Sarah, her lifelong friend Harriet, her partner Katie, and her mother Edith deal with the institution.
I would hate to limit the novel's readership by calling it a woman's novel, but it is primarily about women, Will Perry being a wonderful exception. The career figures are particularly impressive. Sarah's mother is a world-famous arachnidologist who travels the globe for research. Harriet's daughter is a lawyer; Katie is a black woman who has forged a place in business in the small South Carolina town where the story is set. Their identities are carved from their work, and their distances from men.
Some of the controlling psychological insights are stocks-in-trade of family fiction. An instance is the attempt of children to dissociate themselves from their parents' ways. But Hearon also gives us unexpected shifts of perspective. Instead of an emphasis on the difficulty of parents preparing their children for life, she focuses on the reverse, having Harriet say, "What on earth could we have done to prepare for having children?"
Indeed, this fine, heartrending novel is about one's inability to prepare adequately for anything, especially death.
Its honesty, its restraint, its subtlety and gentleness, its humor will not be surprising to readers of Shelby Hearon's fiction. But its subject matter is new to her, and in its own quiet unrelenting way, daring. Distinctions between past and future absorb much of Sarah's attention. She notes her mother's +vocation+ as opposed to her own +job.+ Elsewhere there's regret that "long-term, lifetime commitment to the daily details that lead to something new seemed out of style."
Much of the book's form follows Sarah's comment on Harriet's readying for a new lover a room that had been her husband's and son's: "It was like archeology, like excavating down through layers of the earth."
Even with elegiac tendency, however, "Life Estates" winds up looking its present squarely in the face. At the same time, the novel suggests that the present is palimpsest, after all. The narrative is framed by a question that calls up life as a shape with a beginning and ending, rounded between, a question that serves as the book's leitmotif: "Where's my Sarah?" One would be hard put to find a more careful, attentive fictional embodiment of an answer to such a basic search for identity.
- Dabney Stuart teaches at Washington & Lee University.
by CNB