THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 24, 1994 TAG: 9407220492
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY IRENE NOLAN
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
DOWNTOWN
ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
HarperCollins. 374 pp. $24.
IF YOU ARE a woman who came of age in the '60s, you know Smoky O'Donnell, the protagonist in Anne Rivers Siddons' latest book.
Downtown, Siddons' 10th novel, is one of her most interesting novels, and Smoky O'Donnell, despite the overly cute name, is one of her most interesting characters.
The author of such best sellers as Peachtree Road and Outer Banks, Siddons returns to the South and her native Georgia. The year is 1966; Smoky, who grew up in an Irish Catholic, blue-collar home near the docks in Savannah, Ga., arrives in Atlanta, a vibrant city on the move and, like the rest of the country, on the verge of great change.
Smoky is filled with excitement and apprehension as she steps out of her narrow, protected world and into a city filled with young people who are set to change their world. She has been hired as a senior editor for Downtown, an acclaimed city magazine edited by the charismatic and eccentric Matt Comfort. She joins a staff of bright, dedicated young men and women whose work is the toast of the town.
Against the backdrop of the great social movements of our time - women's, civil rights and peace - Smoky negotiates the passage from girl to woman. She struggles at the male-dominated Downtown magazine to earn her place as a reporter. And she discovers things she didn't know about herself as she wrestles with the difficult personal choices that women make.
Smoky's first byline for the magazine is on a story about one of Atlanta's ``young men on the go.'' Bradley Hunt III is the son of one of Atlanta's old and established families. Smoky is smitten with the handsome and charming Brad, who introduces her to a world she has never known - a world of wealth and privilege, good ole boys and racism.
At the same time, Smoky is assigned to do a series of articles that focus on the city's efforts to deal with civil rights. She works with Lucas Geary, a talented photographer who is a free spirit and a rebel at heart, and John Howard, an enigmatic black lawyer who has been one of Martin Luther King's lieutenants. The two introduce her to yet another world, one that is far from the one that Brad has invited her to share.
Siddons captures the spirit of the '60s, a time that was fast-paced, exciting, dangerous and full of promise. It was a heady time if you were young, and it could also be a confusing time, if, like Smoky O'Donnell, you were a young person sorting out the conflicts between traditional values and new possibilities.
Siddons' success at portraying a generation redefining itself no doubt comes from her own experience. She got her start as a writer on Atlanta magazine in the early and mid-'60s, though she says up front, in an author's note, that Downtown is not autobiographical.
``Atlanta was a wonderful, terrible, particular, and special place in those cusp days of the sixties,'' she writes. ``It could have been no other place on earth, and it will not come again. That luminous particularity is what I strove to capture in these pages. It may not be precisely as you remember it, but to Smoky O'Donnell and to me, this is how it was, and this is the way we were.''
It is the way a lot of us were, no matter where it was that we lived the decade. If you were there, reading Downtown will be a sentimental journey for you, a nostalgia trip that is engrossing, thought-provoking and definitely bittersweet. MEMO: Irene Nolan is editor of ``The Island Breeze'' in Hatteras, N.C., and a
free-lance book reviewer. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
LYNN GOLDSMITH
Anne Rivers Siddons' ``Downtown'' is set against a backdrop of
social turmoil.
by CNB