The Track of Real Desires - Hardcover

This novel set in the small-town South dangles a lot of interesting possibilities but disappoints on half of these. Leland is returning home to Mississippi after more than 35 years living in big cities, and her gay, illegitimate son, Toby, is accompanying her. Most of the action takes place at a dinner party given by her close friend, Melanie, and Melanie's husband, Baker. Leland appears to be ill, but Melanie and Baker wear their pain openly; their teenage daughter slit her wrists in the bathtub, and they have never completely recovered. The other members of their high school gang are also in attendance, each with their own quirks: Overweight Sissy loves opera and expensive clothing; Jane Scott moved home eight years earlier from San Francisco and inexplicably finds herself still there, making jam and sleeping with other people's husbands, including ex-football star Dog, who also is coming to dinner with his wife, Totty. A closeted gay man named Carroll and Melanie and Baker's 12-year-old son Roy--an odd boy who wears a cape and carries his pet rat wrapped around his neck--will round out the group, along with a last-minute guest who comes to fix the sink and ends up with an invite. Each has a well- drawn personality with believable human tics, and Lowry (Crossed Over, 1992) does a capable job of delineating them. There are plenty of funny lines, like this one about Jane Scott: ``Sometimes she thought she lived her entire life to provide country songwriters with material.'' However, all of this southern eccentricity has a familiar feel to it, especially since the pay- off after the boozy reunion is less than shocking--despite Lowry's bald-faced attempts to titillate with references to masturbation and the like. A good read that provides diverting company but little closure. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"Traditionally, the way to get by in the Delta was to drink hard and hold on to your eccentricities," comments one character in Lowry's haunting new novel. The residents of Eunola, Miss., are jolted from their daily coping mechanisms by the return home of Leland Standard, who had "escaped" 30 years earlier, and is now back with her illegitimate 19-year-old son, whose paternity she has never revealed, and yet another secret. In the course of one day and night, eight of Leland's former friends gossip about her and then gather at a dinner party in her honor, which turns into a debacle, ending with two acts of sexual union and one death. Lowry brings us into the interior lives of her sometimes foolish, tacky or pretentious characters to reveal the vulnerability, fear and tenuous hope that governs their existences. These people do drugs to stop their emotional pain, sleep around out of boredom or renounce sex to erase bad memories. With the exception of Leland's son and her best friend's child, all are over 50 and still searching for direction and meaning, wondering how they had strayed so far from "the track of real desires." Meanwhile, their town has turned into a paradigm of an economically depressed community where businesses and farms are failing, where civil rights has changed demographics but not inherent racism, and old values are dying. Lowry's ( Breaking Gentle and the nonfiction Crossing Over ) witty asides keep the narrative airborne, and her affection for her motley characters renders them credible. But nearly every one of them is eccentric in some way, and readers may grow impatient with such a surfeit of bizarre behavior, no matter how adept the author is at portraying it.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.