Sorrow Floats by Tim Sandlin (review)

Reviews 165 actually lives and breathes in the West, having relocated from her native Penn­ sylvania to New Mexico, she is utilizing creative distance by writing of her younger years-childhood and young womanhood. These stories are set in a profoundly eastern American atmosphere with smatterings of a cultured Euro­ pean backdrop as well, as evidenced in the title and subject of her story of a disintegrating marriage, “La SignoraJulia.” These stories have more in common with the works of a less imaginative Francine du Plessix Gray than an astute Willa Cather, but as promised in the flyleaf, they are indeed awoman’sperspective, and they do seek out wisdom and understanding. Unfortunately, they are not memorable. In fact, I found their female characters rather boring. Are they subdued by inexperience? Passive socialization? Occasionally, I sensed an underlying rage in these stories, anger keptunder civilized wraps. However, I’d vote for releasing a bit ofit in small doses here and there ifonly for the singular purpose of providing variation in tone. In “Freddy, The Blind Professor, and the Scent of Roses,” for example, Coleman is either stretching and struggling to force a mundane memory into something deeper, more intellectual, than it really was, or she is burying her character’s fury by forcing an implausible magnanimous narrator upon the reader. PENELOPE REEDY The Redneck Review ofLiterature SorrowFloats. ByTim Sandlin. (New York: Henry Holt, 1992. 352 pages, 21.95.) Maurey Talbot claims to have “devoured Dickens—searching for a clue as to what happens next.”Perhaps this is how she ended up in a picaresque novel, traveling from Jackson, Wyoming, to Greensboro, North Carolina, in an old ambulance with two A. A. converts and a horse trailer full of cow piss (a.k.a. Coors). Not a Pip or a Little Dorritt, at 22, Maurey is a suspiciously well-read cowgirl with a long list of bedfellows, an unacknowledged drinking problem, and a world-class bad attitude. SorrowFloats is an alcoholic’s odyssey from denial to recovery via the road trip from hell. Maurey agrees to the beer run to avoid dealing with her biggest mistake: forgetting that her baby is on the roof of her car and driving away. Unfortunately, it takes three hundred pages of her relentlessly caustic narrative for her to see the light. Mostly, it’s supposed to be funny. Mostly, it’s not. The problem started when Maurey’s father called her a slut, she being pregnant at 13 and all. This paternal slap has led her to despise men and doubt her self-worth. “Between sips [ofYukonJack], I made a list—one dozen pricks I have known.”Ironically, her father doesn’t make the list. SorrowFloats is obviously crafted with care. But even though it has similar features, it does not have the page-turning quality of say, Nabokov’s Lolita, or 166 WesternAmerican Literature Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. All three involve road trips across many states with reprobate narrators. But while Nabokov’s novel is a mesmeriz­ ing psychological study of a shameless pedophile, and Thompson’s is a truly zany, madcap adventure with a cavalier narcotics abuser, Sandlin’s is an awk­ wardly modern Dickens tale with an unlikely heroine. Moreover, all the charac­ ters have at least three notable, if not memorable, quirks; the ragtag group eventually becomes one big happy family; a major character dies; and the heroine gets her act together. The only thing missing is the fmal-chapter loose-ends wrap-up. Given Maurey’s preoccupation with genitalia, unpleasant sexual experi­ ences, and self-pity, the style of humor fails in the Dickensian mode. Rather than cheer her on, we begin to believe in Maurey’s self-contempt as much as she does. As she cuts the waist-long hair ofan adolescent boy, for example, she says, “The scissors were a silver canoe gliding through a golden lake. All these metaphors made myclitoris throb.”Certainly, Sandlin shouldn’t be expected to write like a Victorian, let alone like Dickens; but as Maurey herselfsays, “I’m not a snob or anything, but bad taste offends me.” LORRAINE ENGSTROM Utah State University Native. By William Haywood Henderson. (New...