Me and My Baby View the Eclipse (review)

Book Reviews Norman, Gurney. Divine Right's Trip: A Novel of the Counterculture. Afterword by Ed McClanahan. Frankfort: Gnomon Press, 1990. 311 pages. It would appear that some historical mischance caused this reviewer to miss the counterculture altogether and cynics might sneer that the reissuing of Gurney Norman's Divine Right's Trip is but a ploy to cash in on 1960s nostalgia. Happily, new as well as former readers of this book will marvel at the story's freshness and genuinely human characters . With joy and excitement, Norman relates the epic journey of Divine Right Davenport from cosmically hip California to the apparently plain mountain community of Trace Fork in Eastern Kentucky. Along the way the reader encounters a cast of characters ranging from the almost other worldly Anaheim Flash (that resourceful dispenser of cash and free advice) to a confused Sophist simply known as the Greek, to the long-suffering Estelle, D.R.'s girlfriend. But the progress of the novel is not merely the celebration of the so-called "Alternative Life-Style," despite the numerous icons (dope, geodesic domes, / Ching) presented throughout its pages. Instead, as Divine Right cares for his dying Uncle Emmit in the shadow of a mountain savaged by strip-mining, the story takes on redemptive themes—the search for self, the sense of place and oneness, the quest for meaning. Divine Right encounters beauty in the midst of a mangled landscape, resurrection in death. Divine Right is made new before our eyes, and it is a marvelous sight indeed. Tightly written and hopelessly joyful, Divine Right's Trip captures much of what is celebrated in Appalachian life— the strength of family ties, the almost supernatural sense of place, the important role of nature and environment. This book is also timely in view of the opinions in some circles that Appalachia is still somehow out of touch with mainstream America, with little or nothing to offer. Yet we find in Divine Right and his experiences the profound and the transcendent. Luckily for new readers of this book, Divine Right's Trip is not only a novel of the counterculture generation, but a work that moves beyond these boundaries to affirm, to teach, and to encourage all of us. -Shannon Wilson Smith, Lee. Me and My Baby View the Eclipse. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 206 pages. Hardback: $18.95. In Me and My Baby View the Eclipse, Lee Smith continues to dazzle with her depiction of ordinary lives illuminated by extraordinary flashes of yearning and command of style that ranges from the wry to the comic to the tragic. She demonstrates once more that she is a master of voice: one not only reads her words, one hears them. Smith has one of the keenest ears in American letters not only for the sound of the human voice but the secret longings of the human heart. 68 In her first collection of short stories since Cakewalk, Smith's heroines grow up to be cheerleaders and "Miss WhatEver -High-School," marry their high school sweethearts, and expect to spend their lives taking care of husbands and children. The women and occasional men in these nine stories have been trained to be gallant and to carry on; to take care of elderly parents; and to be polite at all costs. But life has changed the rules and run away with them, disputing their words by the everyday "eclipses" of divorce, illness, death, loss of faith, children, and dreams. Smith catches them as they cope. In "Mom" Gloria sips Andre Champagne from a Dixie Cup for her "nerves" while she waits for a telephone call from her son Buddy, a runaway from a group home. As she sips the champagne purchased at Safeway, dusk falls into dark, the room lit only by the neon lights from the Nu-Tread Tire Company. Early in "Tongues of Fire," the longest story in the coflection, the narrator announces the events of summer, her story, and her mother's rules for life: "The year I was thirteen my father had a nervous breakdown, my brother had a wreck, and I started speaking in tongues." Her mother supplied her a...