This Old House

By John Skow

Punishment is merciless for writers of novels that ring in the mind. Unsophisticated readers demand the same bells next time, only louder. Sophisticated readers pretend they do not want an encore, although they really do, and they are vigilant in condemning repetition.

So Lee Smith has reason to fear. Her new novel follows such a bell ringer, a haunting and resonant story of Appalachia called Oral History (1983). Family Linen uses the same narrative technique: members of a troubled clan are revealed directly to the reader, one by one, in contrasting chapters.

This time the family whose strangely assorted Linen hangs out to dry is an odd lot of small-town Virginians. Their matriarch, now dying peacefully, may have helped herself to widowhood with an ax some years ago and then dropped her defunct husband down a well. That possibility thrusts itself on her daughter Sybill, a middle-aged spinster who sees a hypnotist to have her subconscious unclogged. Her mother inconveniently expires before Sybill can begin an inquiry. To her siblings, that is just as well. They, and the cousins and in-laws who gather for the funeral, regard talk of ancient murder as tiresome and hysterical. This is an unfocused bunch, and they are not in the mood for Faulknerian horror.

Nor does the author seem to be. A bulldozer arrives, and the old well is excavated. A long-buried murder that comes to light cuts to the heart of the family, or should. The discovery provokes another death. Yet the survivors behave more or less as they would have done if nothing had occurred. This is not satire, with the family members portrayed as herd animals who go on grazing as a lion drags down one of them. The author is sharp but not cruel. She does not tell her story in order to solve a murder (although solve it she does) nor to subject her characters to unbearable stress in order to analyze their failures. The dark secret of the well, in a conventional narrative, would be the engine that drives the book. Here it is an undercurrent.

Smith is interested in her plot, but she is fascinated by her people. Not judging, just watching in an amiable way, she gives us Sybill, prim, quivering with repression, afraid that the hypnotist is a fake, terrified that he is not. She shows us another daughter, a hairdresser named Candy, happily and efficiently shampooing her dead mother's hair, and working in a little White Mink to dull out the yellow. She hears clearly the grouchy yap of Teenager Sean, driven loony by parent effectiveness: "I mean you come home from school really pissed about something . . . and they say something like, 'Gee, son, you're very angry!' and then if you say 'Well yes, I am pretty goddamn angry' they say 'Yes! Yes, you are! I can tell you're angry!' and that's it. Then they smile a big faggy smile and go off whistling."

The peculiar thought arises that Smith writes her slightly ramshackle novels in a mood of philanthropy, to give shelter to her vulnerable characters. Good for her, good for them, good for us. --By John Skow Best Sellers

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