DATE: Sunday, October 26, 1997              TAG: 9710160707

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY EUGENE M. McAVOY 

                                            LENGTH:   79 lines

THE SOUTH SPEAKS, IN VARIED VOICES

NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH

The Year's Best, 1997

EDITED BY SHANNON RAVENEL

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 306 pp. $12.95 paper.

For 11 years, Shannon Ravenel, editorial director at Algonquin Books, has edited New Stories from the South. In that time, the series has been consistently recognized for its excellence, even as the debate over what ``Southern'' literature is or whether it actually exists has grown more heated. Surprisingly, this year's collection continues, rather than silences, that debate.

In his preface to New Stories, writer Robert Olen Butler eschews the idea of a ``Southern'' literature. ``For the artist,'' he writes, ``her cultural history or her settings are simply the surface, the sensual ways into her true matter. . . '' To an extent, he is correct; history and location are but two of the many vantage points from which to explore a truth. But in a far more meaningful way, he is mistaken. In the best of fiction, history and setting lie not on the surface, but at the heart of a work. They are not merely sensual aspects of a story, they are visceral. The stories in this collection - including Butler's ``Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover'' - demonstrate exactly that.

As might be expected, many of these stories deal with death while reaffirming the joys and difficulties of life. In Patricia Elam Ruff's ``The Taxi Ride,'' an elderly woman discovers, while grieving for her dying husband, the friendship of a gentle cabby. In Marc Vassollo's ``After the Opera,'' a man and his mother attempt to navigate a relationship forever changed by the death of the young man's father. And in Judy Troy's ``Ramone,'' a young girl moves with her family to rural Texas, where she discovers the horror and necessity of feeling too much.

Not all of the stories, however, are dark. Tim Gatreaux offers both low comedy and home-spun wisdom in ``Little Frogs in a Ditch,'' about a good-for-nothing loser who sells roosting pigeons as homing pigeons to the innocent and unsuspecting. Lee Smith also provides a dose of irony in ``Native Daughter,'' in which a ``worldly'' Kentucky girl is exposed as the naive gold digger her lecherous companions perceive her to be.

Two of the best stories in this collection belong to Pam Durban and Ellen Douglas. Durban's ``Gravity'' explores the mystery and danger the South holds for its inhabitants. In it, a bridge between Charleston and Sullivan's Island, S.C., becomes a metaphor for the plight of a woman's Southern family and the land that produced them:

``She remembered the scene from her mother's story: all of them in the car together, crossing the bridge high over the water, listening to Mamie's prayers and her father's outburst . . . she also remembered how her father had grown philosophical after he'd silenced Mamie. Looking down at the water, he'd offered them the same detail every time. Water would feel like concrete if you fell into it from this height, he'd say. And just like that, how high they were became how far they could fall, how close they were to falling.''

Douglas' ``Julia and Nellie,'' an examination of the conflicts of religion and love and the healing potential of friendship is the coup de mai'tre of the collection. In its skillful twisting of time, voice and point-of-view, the story merges with myth, becoming a hybrid of the fictions of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor that remains beautifully traditional yet original. More than any other story in this edition, it embodies a South wounded by its past but stealing self-consciously and inexorably forward.

All of the stories in this volume - from the fables in Brad Vice's ``Mojo Farmer'' and Elizabeth Gilbert's ``The Finest Wife'' to the poetry in Janice Daugharty's ``Along a Wider River'' and Lucy Hochman's ``Simpler Components'' - display a uniquely Southern experience or view of life. Despite Butler's protests, the stories demonstrate that there does exist a literature profoundly influenced by geography and informed by history. It is a literature wrought from tradition and, more important, the painful breaking from that tradition. This is the literature of the South - at once universal and particular, beautiful and horrific - a literature that could have come from nowhere else. MEMO: Eugene McAvoy is a writer who lives in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Shannon Ravenel

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