Book Review : Bluegrass Romance and Woodsmanship

Private Woods, by Sandra Crockett Moore (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $18.95; 275 pages)

You know you’ve missed the Westwood off-ramp when, right on the first page, one of the male characters says, “Hon, would you mind fixing me a spittoon?”

Moore’s first novel is set in a lodge in the hills of eastern Tennessee, where a party of five has gone deer hunting. Their guide is to be Sonny Woods, a Vietnam War veteran loved by the narrator, Sarah Lissom, when Sonny and Sarah were scarcely out of their teens.

Though Sonny returned from Vietnam to claim his intended bride, their first postwar encounter was a disaster, for reasons eventually explained in the novel. A scant four months later, Sarah married Dick Lissom, and has lived more or less happily ever after.

Now Sonny and Sarah will meet again after 17 years, buffered by Sarah’s friend Trudie, her tobacco-chewing husband Braxton, Sonny’s wife Lou, Sarah’s handsome and successful husband Dick, and Dick’s colleague Clifford Hurley, a real good ole boy from around there somewhere. Absent from the novel but crucial to the plot is Sarah’s brother Joe, killed in Vietnam before he could explain to Sarah what happened to Sonny during the war to affect him so profoundly.

Sarah, Joe, and Sonny had grown up in the small town of Cedar Point, Tenn., an inseparable threesome despite the fact that a serious social and economic gulf separated Sonny’s family from that of his more fortunate friends. Despite the difference in status, one day Sarah abruptly stopped being the tag-along kid sister and became the sweetheart of her brother’s best friend. There was hardly time to get used to the change before Sonny and Joe both went to war. If this is all beginning to sound like a country-western ballad, just wait till Sonny and Sarah go off on an illicit picnic in the woods and spend the night together in a cabin deep in the wilderness.

Before that happens, Braxton wounds a deer without killing it, an event the narrator tells us is the worst thing possible in the society of deer hunters, surpassed only “by shooting a human or a head of livestock.” In the course of the search for the wounded animal, the urban reader can learn enough woodsmanship to get honor marks in Outward Bound. Though the accident is tragic, the hunt gives Dick Lissom an opportunity to prove his manhood to the others, and allows Sarah and her old friend Trudie to relive old times. The search also permits these two women to get acquainted with Sonny’s wife, Lou, who not only turns out to be Sarah’s third cousin but a uniquely generous person as well.

Acute Sensitivity

Because “Private Woods” depends so heavily on plot for its effect, to tell the story in any more detail would be unkind. When Moore is describing the stunning mountain landscape, her prose shows the acute sensitivity to color and form that one would expect from an artist-narrator.

As long as the author is concentrating on the boozy, sexist world of the deer hunter, sharing her knowledge of how to track a gut-shot animal, dress its meat and cook for the ravenous menfolks, not to mention fixing that spittoon, she’s on home ground.

Once indoors, in that wilderness cabin with her true love, her style loses its luster and slides into the cliches of Gothic romance. The ending, telegraphed by increasingly obvious hints throughout the last quarter of the book, won’t surprise anyone past puberty, though it seems entirely appropriate to this bluegrass romance.