DATE: Sunday, September 14, 1997            TAG: 9709060619

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY TIM WARREN 

                                            LENGTH:   78 lines

PAT SOLUTIONS DILUTE VENOM OF ``SNAKE SHOW''

THE LAST GREAT SNAKE SHOW

TIM MCLAURIN

Putnam. 224 pp. $24.95.

Jubal Lee is a snake handler. He's part of a colorful troupe that in its act mixes a little naughtiness - hooch and stripping and, who knows, maybe something more sinful - with Jubal's show-stopping performance with a rattlesnake. It's not hard for him to evade a snapping rattler; he knows how to grab it from behind and even milk its venom into a glass - from which he then drinks the venom. Why does he do this? ``If I'm really honest with myself,'' he acknowledges, ``I'd say that I pick up rattler more out of fear than anything brave.

Confronting oneself is a central theme of The Last Great Snake Show, the fourth novel by Tim McLaurin. Most of the main characters have scarred pasts, and often one awful emotional burden they have carried alone for so many years.

McLaurin, who teaches writing at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, also is concerned with the South, the old and the new, and what has been lost in the transition. It's a confrontation of a different kind, in which Jubal and his friends, most of them native North Carolinians, must re-examine their culture.

This is a lot to digest, and in a short comic novel McLaurin has his hands full. He writes knowingly of the South, especially of southeastern North Carolina, whose very soul one character notes has been lost to development and to Yankees and Californians who are ``buying up land and building big houses, then complaining about the crowded roads and schools and the fact that most stores don't stock smoked salmon or imported beer.'' His main characters, eccentric as they are, are lovingly sketched, and the terrain convincingly evoked.

But away from the South, The Last Great Snake Show often becomes an embarrassing pastiche of cliches and half-baked caricatures - did we really have to find the troupe performing in Idaho before white supremacists, and in Colorado before stoned, blissed-out artist dilettantes? And toward the end, McLaurin is so intent on delivering messages the reader feels his points are being delivered not with words but with a hammer to the head.

As the novel opens, Jubal is performing at the House of Joy, a honky-tonk down by the waterfront in Wilmington, N.C. His colleagues include Glory, a black dancer, and Cappy, a crusty ex-soldier who dresses up in whatever costume is called for by the night's entertainment. The shows often have an Antebellum South theme, so Cappy might dress up as a Confederate officer and Glory with a Confederate flag and yes, some mock chains around her. Hokey stuff, to be sure, but it works.

Overseeing it all is Miss Darlene, a former dancer herself who now, in her 60s, only wants to spend her final days on some land she brought years ago in Oregon. When a tornado levels the House of Joy, the troupe takes off for the West Coast to fulfill Miss Darlene's dream: It seems that the tornado left a glass splinter in Miss Darlene's brain and her days are numbered. Ahead are several performances before unfamiliar audiences before they reach Oregon.

While camping in the Great Smokies, they encounter a stowaway, a young woman named Kitty. She says she grew up in an orphanage, but her genteel manner and sophistication make the others suspicious. But they can use another hand, and she signs on as their bus driver.

Kitty is also running away from something - a wedding to a fine young man in Wilmington whom she happens not to love. In an all-too-convenient plot turn, we learn that Kitty, the daughter of a wealthy land developer, and Jubal, who grew up a waterman's son and knows the hard-scrabble life well, are in fact linked by their families' pasts.

McLaurin devises some resolutions so transparent they belong in a movie-of-the-week. And it's a shame that someone who knows the South so well - he wrote a fine memoir called Keeper of the Moon: A Southern Boyhood - egregiously exaggerates the ignorance of non-Southerners about the region. But that's why this novel is frustrating: What McLaurin gives us in fine comic touches and loving familiarity with the South, he takes away with didacticism and pat solutions. As the author must know, nothing has ever been easy in the South, especially writing about it. MEMO: Tim Warren, a former book editor for The Baltimore Sun, is a

writer who lives in Silver Spring, Md.

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