THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 28, 1994 TAG: 9408300380
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
SCHOOL FOR THE BLIND
DENNIS McFARLAND
Houghton Mifflin. 287 pp. $21.95.
School for the Blind, Dennis McFarland's touching second novel, powerfully evokes the aches of nostalgia and the sometimes chilling, sometimes comforting forebodings of death confronting an elderly brother and sister in Florida.
McFarland's debut, The Music Room, which was set primarily in Norfolk, won lavish praise for the beauty of his language. And his second book doesn't disappoint. His prose is exquisite - elegant yet penetrating, almost moving enough to make the reader cry as often as the teary-eyed sister, Muriel Brimm.
Muriel - a retired librarian, unmarried, alone except for a few friends - has lived her entire life in Pines, a small Gulf Coast town in Florida. She can be peevish at times, girlish at others. Her brother, Francis, watching her sway barefoot in a swing, wonders:
``How was it possible that a woman approaching her ninth decade of life could still be such a girl in all the fundamental ways? There was something about that stubborn refusal to mature, an almost pathological arrestedness in her that was extremely unsettling.''
Francis at first seems so unlike his sister. He was a world-traveling photojournalist, enjoying frequent flings with women, before retiring to live in his childhood home. Yet he is suffering from a different form of arrested development. Reflecting on his detachment - from women, from emotion, from life - he realizes something: ``For the first time ever, it occurred to him that he might have developed this hard journalist's composure in his boyhood, stranded as he'd been on that island of madness and abomination in Pines.''
His ``madness and abomination'' are revealed, bit by bit, in a moving series of flashbacks. The book, in fact, is almost a string of visions. McFarland's gift is to make each one - whether an apocalyptic event or a simple moment in time - touching to the reader.
Francis and Muriel, for instance, both remember the Oberammergau Passion Play that came to town when they were children. Francis recalls his mother's emotional response: ``Mrs. Brimm cleared her throat and lifted her head, facing the crucifixion in a resigned sort of way. She dabbed at her cheeks with the crumpled Kleenex, which she then dropped to the floor. Frankie looked down into the dark by his feet and watched the wad of tissue, freed from the constraint of his mother's hand, begin slowly to open, to blossom like a damp, milky flower.''
Muriel's thoughts return to the smile she caught from the man who played Jesus: ``Smiled to her, only to her, and oh how her heart had leapt! She had pondered that moment for hours afterward, wondering whether he had smiled at her as Christ or as a young actor in a Passion play, and she had judged precisely that ambiguity to be truly Christlike. The actual Jesus must have radiated that identical God-or-man confusion with every gesture, surely with every smile.''
Muriel also recalls a line from a story she'd read years ago: ``Don't talk to me about memories. Give me memories.'' And that's what the siblings realize, too: Horrid as it was, the past is past. They are drawn back into the present.
Part of what draws them there is a murder mystery in town. More important is the arrival of a newcomer who helps fulfill Muriel's need to nurture and Francis' need to connect with somebody.
In yet another of McFarland's beautifully drawn moments, Muriel realizes the joys of old age: She compares life to a ``halftime show in a stadium at a ball game, unsure of itself, amateurish, and she one of the few who had remained faithful enough in the bleachers to see it through to the last number, where, surprisingly, it redeemed itself.'' MEMO: Philip Walzer is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design and illustration by HONI WERNER
by CNB