Act of Contrition by Janice Holt Giles (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS OPINIONS AND REVIEWS Janice Holt Giles. Act ofContrition. Foreword by Wade Hall. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. 266 pages. $25.00 cloth. Not too long before she died, my grandmother, a legend in the kitchen, gave me a cookbook for Christmas. It was a reissue of one compiled some thirty years earlier by another legendary cook—a local TV personality who had a morning cooking show when I was a kid. Besides Concentration and Jeopardy!, the local Homemakers' Show was my grandmother's favorite morning television fare. The cookbook contains standard recipes for 1950s home culinary arts, mostly meat and potatoes recipes and many variations on canned vegetable casseroles. In keeping with the times, there is a section of recipes called "Man of the House Specialties." I thought of that cookbook while reading Janice Holt Giles' "lost" novel, Act of Contrition, when the female protagonist says: "How universal it is . .. this feminine pleasure in serving a meal to a man. No amount of trouble is too much, and the reward is the instinct itself." Much like Giles' novel, it is difficult to read that cookbook today without dismissing it or at least needing to alter the recipes for contemporary tastes. Written in the early 1950s but rejected twice by Giles' publisher, Houghton Mifflin, Act ofContrition was considered too scandalous and dangerous for Giles' reading audiences. According to a recent press release, her publishers believed that Act of Contrition "would have alienated Giles from her devoted readers and would have irreparably harmed her reputation. Her books were regularly chosen by both the Book of the Month Club and the Family Book Club. Further, the portrayal of the Catholic Church as a kind of "villain" that impedes the protagonists' love would have drawn heavy criticism from the Catholic community." Today, after Vatican II and the relaxation of social rules in America, Giles' love story hardly seems disreputable or threatening. This does not mean that Act ofContrition is necessarily an irrelevant or an unreadable book. Janice Holt Giles was a prolific and popularwriter who lived inAdair County, Kentucky, and set most of her work in the Kentucky region. Act of Contrition was recently rediscovered by Giles' daughter and finally 84 published as Giles' twenty-fifth book. Coming to readers a half century after it was written, Act ofContrition dramatically captures the prevailing attitudes and assumptions about gender roles and social codes in midcentury America. As such, it becomes a kind of document, a record of a particularAmerican time and culture. And in the tradition of sensational love stories, the premarital love affair between Regina Browning and Mike Panelli is well told and even exciting in places. When the story begins, Regina Browning, a 33-year-old widow, has just taken a position as librarian for a small midwestern college. When Regina sprains her ankle, she is attended by Dr. Mike Panelli, the handsome local physician. Their mutual attraction for one another is nearly immediate, and the rest of the narrative is built around the development of their romantic relationship. Regina, however, is unaware of the many barriers she will encounter as it is revealed that Mike's strict Catholicism prevents their marriage. Even though Mike's firstwife has lefthim for another man, the church will not recognize Mike's legal divorce or proposed marriage to Regina. If he marries Regina, he will be excommunicated from the church and rejected by some members of his family. Giles' strengths as a storyteller are manifested in at least two areas. First, she so skillfully draws the interior workings of the characters that the reader knows without ambiguity the needs, desires and motivations of Regina and Mike. When Regina meets Mike's priest in a restaurant— before she understands that the church will not recognize their marriage—she senses a foreboding by reading Mike's face. The narrator says, "looking up [Regina] saw that Mike's face had altered from the relaxed, happy quietness it had worn all day. She caught a glimpse of acute dismay, and then a settling to impassivity which was almost stoical in its discipline. Even his eyes had gone dark and remote. She felt a little frightened." The...