Books

by Mary Beachum

The Pajama Girls of Lambert Square
by Rosina Lippi
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2008

Once upon a time, the pattern of a romantic novel was predictable. Man and woman meet, in some cute way. Despite setbacks, they develop feelings for each other. Then they overcome a major obstacle, declare their love, fall into each other’s arms and are swept away by passion. Well, that is just so 20th century. Today man and woman meet, in some cute way. They decide to indulge in some recreational sex, discover a few common interests and are dismayed to find that they are developing emotional entanglements. After a dance of “on again and off again,” they reluctantly admit that they are in love and walk hand-in-hand into the sunset.

Julia Darrow is a widow who came to Lamb’s Corner, S.C., to open a store in Lambert Square, a historic factory that her late husband had renovated into an upscale shopping area. She runs Cocoon, a specialty linen and pajama store, which thrives through tourism and its website. John Dodge specializes in taking floundering businesses and turning them around for resale, which suits his lifestyle of never settling down in one place. He buys Scrivener’s in Lambert Square, moves into the apartment upstairs and discovers Julia in a neighboring apartment, living with three rescue dogs.

John is claustrophobic, both in terms of a fear of tight spaces and a fear of feeling boxed in in his life. Julia is agoraphobic, both in terms of never leaving the secure space of Lambert Square and in terms of breaking out of the box left by the wounds of her husband’s death. The populace of Lamb’s Corner is a mixed bag of loveable local Southern folk and imported Swedes newly moved to town to build a factory. In a parallel love story, Julia’s single-mom African-American assistant, Mayme, finds herself involved with Nils, the new factory manager. They struggle to reconcile the differences in their backgrounds, with the sometime aid and sometime obstruction of Mayme’s precocious daughter, Bean. The story moves along at a brisk pace, as Lippi navigates the plots and subplots with a light touch, warmth, witty language and an eye for the foibles of modern society.

Wicked City
by Ace Atkins
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2008

Phenix City, Ala. A warm summer night in 1954. In a dark alley, a man is shot and crawls into the street. It is a crime that would normally go uninvestigated and unsolved in the “wickedest city in America.” Except that this victim was Albert Patterson, the newly elected state attorney general. He had run on a vow to wipe out the corruption. The ensuing events, which play out with the full attention of the national media, make a story as compelling and uniquely American as any crime writer could imagine.

In Wicked City, Ace Atkins has retold the Phenix City story in a manner that looks like a classic crime noir novel, but he has a different take. “What followed his [Patterson’s] murder was a movie, a Randolph Scott western, played out not with horses and Winchesters but with Chevys and Fords and .38s and switchblades, until the city was dismantled, stacked in vacant fields and left to burn in smoldering trash heaps for the entire state to see.” His heroes include an ex-fighter mechanic who is a leader of the Russell County Betterment Association, the son of the murdered man and a bull-headed National Guard general. His villains are a nasty lot of gamblers, madams, moonshiners, pornographers, cockfighters and corrupt officials. His victims are young mill-town girls forced into prostitution, soldiers cheated and beaten and ordinary townspeople disgusted from living in fear.

In retelling this story, Atkins has a large number of characters that must be woven into a complex plot. He does this extremely well, breaking the third-person narrative with segments told in the first person by Lamar Murphy, the mechanic citizen activist. He nails the tough prose style with bits like, “That bitch wears evil like a perfume.” Even as he digs into the depths of moral depravity, he elevates the honest folk who risk all to fight it. And he does so in a manner that keeps the reader eager to find out what happens next.

Pig Candy
by Lise Funderburg
Free Press, 2008

The ?subtitle of Lise Funderburg’s memoir, Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home, describes the cycle of African-Americans who fled the racism of the South in their youth and returned to a more open society in the place they will always call home. It is both her memoir of his last years and a biography of her father, a light-skinned black man who found the color line both a barrier and a tightrope to be walked. “The restrictions he grew up under…were, in his case, not actually because of the color of his skin, but because of the idea of skin color.”

George Funderburg grew up in Monticello, Ga., the son of a doctor, a man who negotiated with pride and cleverness his role as the leading citizen of the black community. George himself started college at Morehouse, but he couldn’t settle down. Eventually he moved to Philadelphia, married a white woman, had three daughters, left them for his second wife, made a lot of money in real estate, retired and bought a farm back in Monticello for a second home. As an elderly man, he contracted cancer. During this period his daughters began taking him back South between treatments to stay on the farm and to support his efforts to see a public park created to honor his father.

His daughter Lise, a writer, saw in his personal story a reflection of a greater tale in our society and an opportunity to look at the relationships of small-town life. She was insatiably curious, picking up on the histories of all the families in the town and documenting with photographs that bring their faces alive. She doesn’t always go easy on her father, who she describes as “a man who’s made it through life on smarts and hard work, yes, but mostly mettle, plunging forward despite logic, law, society, history, custom, emotion.” All of this is reflected in his quest to make pig candy, a particularly tasty barbecue involving a whole pig, a fancy metal cooking cage, a large hole in the ground and bags of charcoal. He roped a variety of new and old friends into the project and ended with a big party that drew from all segments of the community.

A good memoir looks at an individual life in such a way that readers not only feel they have made a new friend but also enjoy another perspective on the times through which the subjects lived. Pig Candy succeeds on both counts.