Salt (review)

Ugly region (where time stood still even after the New Deal's WPA tried to put a road in there—creating the subject of one these stories). Lenore went to high school in Hamlin, to West Virginia University and eventually married an engineer. She spent a good deal of her life in Indonesia, China, and the Philippines. But she remembered Lincoln County and went back there with her family whenever she could. And she started writing stories set there. Lenore's stories don't go back as far as 1800, but that was when McComases were the firstpeople to settle in Lincoln County's Mud River Valley. The McComases have always represented high standards there, so it figures that Lenore's stories attain high writing standards—and it also figures that they depict high personal standards of loyalty, tolerance, and generosity. Those values pervade the choices that Lenore's characters make—excluding the choices made by the bad 'uns, of course. Some of these stories are based on fact. For instance, Chuck Yaeger really did buzz Hamlin (his home town) during World War II and send its civil-defense volunteers running for cover. Lenore treats that lightheartedly —in sharp contrast with the next story, the longest one in the book and also the best. It's called "Early Transparent" and Lenore tells it from four participants' very different perspectives—last of all through the eyes of the young wife and mother who faces a deep choice when she learns in 1945 that her high school sweetheart, officially dead according to the Red Cross, instead had survived the Bataan Death March and had just been found in bad condition in a Japanese POW camp. When I went to Lincoln County in 1971, I was among the newcomers who some of Lenore's stories are about. I ran out of economic options and had to leave. That's why it's so good again to hear a calm McComas voice distilling common sense. —Paul Salstrom Zuber, Isabel. Salt. New York: Picador USA, 2002. 352 pages. Hardcover $25.00. In the introduction to her book of poems, Winter's Exile, Isabel Zuber says, "By drawing these poems together like this, I hope they will also honor a lostway oflife that, while itwas rockhard and oftenpainful, was also beautiful, moving, and satisfying in a way that we may not be able to recover." It seems that in her first novel, Salt, she wished to do the same. Her protagonist, Anna Maude Stockton, lives at the turn of the 87 twentieth century, where kerosene gives way to electricity and most of the great wilderness animals are long gone from western North Carolina. Anna Stockton and her sister, Nell, grow up with enormous freedom to roam the forest and fields. Though their father disapproves, he seems unable (or unwilling) to over rule their beautiful German mother. Anna grows up longing for learning and culture. She is an imaginative, creative, and sensitive child, given to mythical and mystical encounters. As a teenager, she is sent to live, as a servant, with friends of her mother. Here, she is exposed to the finer life. She has books, music, good friends, and her first marriage proposal. The son of the house offers marriage and Anna does not accept. She realizes that the offer is made more of rebellion than of love. It is Anna's marriage to John Bayley that centers the novel. Raised by his mother and step-father, John feels cheated ofhis inheritance and spends the rest of his life trying to overcome his feelings of inferiority. By the time Anna meets John, he is twice-widowed. Theirs is a turbulent relationship. John is difficult and Anna is not compliant or willing to be dominated. She marries him because she is pregnant and spends much of her life with him as a pregnant, yet resourceful, housewife. Much to John's dismay, Anna flies in the face of convention, refusing to act as he believes a woman ought to behave. The overwhelming theme of the book is man's transitory nature compared to the whole of creation. Zuber prefaces her book with Kathryn Stripling Byer's poem "Empty...