THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 23, 1995 TAG: 9504180554
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LYNN DEAN HUNTER
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
WHITE BOYS AND RIVER GIRLS
PAULA K. GOVER
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 225 pp. $17.95.
There's all kinds of madness in the world. . . Some of it gets you locked up. Some of it puts you on pills so you don't have to think, just remember to breathe and eat. Most of it leaves you in the here and now, not quite broken, not quite whole.
White Boys and River Girls, a debut short-story collection by Paula K. Gover, recounts all manner of modern madness; in particular, the aftereffects - ``how they leave us.''
In nine well-crafted tales, Gover chronicles the legacies of drug use, back-room abortion, child abuse, spousal rape, kidnapping, racial hatred. Businessmen take cocaine breaks. Babies are a means of barter. Her characters, bruised and mistrustful, look for ways to live in tragedy's aftermath. Set in Georgia and her native Michigan, Gover's stage is a hard world tempered with humor, forgiveness and maternal love.
The title story, which appeared in New Stories from the South, 1993, concerns Donnie, a self-satisfied white boy from Tyler, Ga., who falls in love with Yolanda, a biracial girl from ``down to the river.'' Yolanda is an artist and a fortuneteller. She says, ``Let me tell you about girls like me. . . sometimes we get free, go away, get jobs, get educated, but the river don't leave you. . . I can't never be really free.''
Donnie has a lot to learn about women who are, as he explains, ``not his regular type,'' and about class prejudice - his own. ``White Boys and River Girls'' is a masterful story about the opening of one closed mind.
``My Naked Beauty'' is a gently humorous story in which a middle-aged feminist helps Corinne, her teenage daughter, compete in a beauty pageant. In search of the perfect tan, Corinne swabs herself with Valvoline. She changes her eye color and bumps-and-grinds in the kitchen. ``And for this,'' the mother marvels, ``I went through Lamaze, Montessori, and Girl Scouts.''
``We've quit trying to talk about the things we no longer agree on. We sigh a lot. She sighs in eye-rolling dramatic contempt at the black nest of hair under each of my arms. The sight of my thatched shins is enough to send her into spasms of `Gross, God, gross, no wonder Dad left you.' ''
Corinne's struggle with her sexual identity, told in her mother's wry commentary, makes ``My Naked Beauty'' a fine tragicomedy.
The last story, ``Chances with Johnson,'' set on a Michigan hillside, tells of the madness and despair of broken families. Elizabeth and Johnson, both newly single and grieving, inch toward mutual trust. Johnson mourns for his children, now relocated in distant Tampa, Fla. Elizabeth feels herself slipping into madness.
``Now I've got Johnson to talk to. I tell him, `I've been crazy, you know, really crazy.' He smiles when I say this. . . Nights are the worst time for thinking, he tells me. He met me a year after my ex-husband Jim took off with our oldest son, Eddie, and Johnson says that's enough to drive anyone out of their mind.''
While Elizabeth lives day to day, she calculates what the chances are that she and Johnson would be happy together. Johnson, meanwhile, finds an answer that redeems them both.
White Boys and River Girls is a fresh look at contemporary ills. Gover's versatile range of narrators, who vary in age, race, sex and background, creates a unified picture of human troubles. Her use of language is deft, tough and modern; her settings real and detailed. And, at the end, Gover gives the reader a rare gift: She brings back hope.
- MEMO: Lynn Dean Hunter is a short-story writer, poet and associate fiction
editor of The Crescent Review. She lives in Virginia Beach. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
In her debut short-story collection, ``White Boys and River Girls,''
Paula K. Gover examines all kinds of modern madness.
by CNB