THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 29, 1996 TAG: 9609300205
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: 79 lines
THE RIVER BEYOND THE WORLD
JANET PEERY
Picador/St. Martin's Press, 286 pp., $24
Single mother Janet Peery came from Wichita, Kan., to Hampton Roads in 1993 with three daughters and a one-year appointment as a visiting assistant professor at Old Dominion University.
``I really needed the job,'' she explained.
Her highly praised volume of short stories, Alligator Dance, came out that year and promptly won the Whiting Foundation Writers Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Foundation Award.
Three years and another book later, she remains at ODU, but she is no longer visiting. A full-time faculty member in creative writing, Peery, now married to WAVY-TV military reporter Cy Bolton, has a home in Norfolk's Colonial Place and a sense of new roots.
But the wild west of Wichita - with its lingering sense of populist outlawry and stark, wide-open spaces - continues to inform her fiction.
``The sky is different there,'' said Peery, 48, relaxing on the porch of her home. ``You can see more of it. You get a greater sense of being small.''
Set in the Texas/Mexico border country, her first novel, The River Beyond the World, is a skillfully plaited story of two lives that come together in an ultimately redemptive, if mercurially devastating, relationship.
The novel spans more than 50 years and is told in alternating voices.
Maria Luisa Villamil y Cantu, poor and pregnant, comes from Salsipuedes, a Mexican town that translates darkly ``leave if you can.'' Edwina Harmon Hatch, wealthy but unhappy as a housewife, hails from Lynchburg, Va. Luisa becomes Eddie's housemaid in the Texas border community of Rio Paradiso, at a bend in the river in Hidalgo County.
They contend.
You knew what scorpions and snakes could do, but people could look one way and think another and there was no way to tell.
``I don't think any real explicitness exists in human encounters,'' Peery said. ``We can aim for it. But there is so much beneath the surface that makes things not what they seem to be.''
Peery demonstrates behavior. She implies motivation. That reticence encrypts her prose.
But it also clarifies her intentions.
``I was brought up Presbyterian and half-breed Baptist,'' she said. ``If I have a message, it's that it's hard to be human. We go about it in such complex and often bumbling ways.''
Ultimately, her sensitively wrought tale is a meditation on forgiveness.
What we want for everyone else is justice; what we want for ourselves is mercy.
In the waters of The River Beyond the World, we encounter measures of both.
``Hearts are made two ways,'' her mother said. ``Some are full with what they're given, no matter how small, and others can't forget what they can't have.''
Peery's fine novel becomes a book about bridging borders, something Peery has accomplished in art and life. Today she teaches in prose and practice what stories are and can do.
``After three years,'' she said, ``this feels like home.''
As an undergraduate at Wichita State, Peery studied romance languages and earned a bachelor's degree in speech pathology. Years later, she returned for a master's of fine arts in fiction. From the start Peery was interested in the uses of language, and she is still providing remote sensibilities with the compelling power to explain themselves.
It's about voices - and choices.
As Peery spoke on the porch, ebullient piano music filtered out from the practicing fingers of Gretchen, her middle child, a senior at Maury High.
``There are ways to be anything you want to be here,'' said the transplanted westerner of her new Hampton Roads turf. ``It's good for my daughters, coming from a much more homogenous place. It allows them to become who they were meant to be.'' MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann, a mass communications professor at Virginia
Wesleyan College, is a books columnist for the Virginian-Pilot. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Janet Peery teaches creative writing at Old Dominion University. by CNB