Book Review : Start at Mid-Confusion in a Parochial Catholic South

How I Got Him Back or Under the Cold Moon’s Shine by Valerie Sayers (Doubleday: $17.95; 336 pages)

If you’ve read Valerie Sayer’s first novel, “Due East,” you’ll recognize the three stalwarts of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Altar Guild as they gossip about the impending divorce of Jack and Becky Purdue. Lacking that advantage, you have every right to wonder who they are and why they haven’t been properly introduced.

Eventually, of course, you’ll realize that you’re in the midst of a sequel; setting, characters and plot having been established in the prior book. Even so, a cold plunge into “How I Got Him Back” is a daunting experience, calculated to leave the uninitiated in total confusion, quite unaware that Jack has left Becky and their four children for a redhaired real estate agent named Judi, and that Stephen Dugan, though still married to Marygail, is once again thinking of marrying Mary Faith Rapple, whom he got pregnant four years ago.

Mary Faith, though only 16 at the time, showed true grit by moving in with her widowed father and raising the boy herself, thereby earning Stephen’s admiration as well as his love. Though he hasn’t yet gotten around to freeing himself from Marygail, he’s taken a few baby steps in that direction. They’ve begun seeing each other again, but Mary Faith senses that Stephen’s passion is waning and their long deferred plan to escape to Europe so that Stephen can write novels while Mary Faith supports the family as an engineer is beginning to seem more remote than ever.

What we have here, then, is Becky Purdue trying to get Jack back; Marygail and Mary Faith both trying to get Stephen Dugan back, while Tim Rooney, who has just about recovered from a severe nervous breakdown, tries to get himself back so he can lure Mary Faith away from Stephen Dugan, who hardly deserves one wife, let alone two.

Assuming that her readers are already completely familiar with the emotional problems bedeviling the parishioners of Our Lady, Sayers allows her characters to speak for themselves right from the start, leaving us to match them up and sort them out as best we can, a job complicated by the fact that Stephen Dugan’s wife and lover share part of the same first name. From time to time, we also hear from Becky Purdue’s sister Grace, who no longer lives in Due East, but still sounds like everyone else from down home. The only absolutely unmistakable character here is Father Berkeley, whose vocation has spared him the problems of marriage and divorce, though not the temptations of drink.

Outsiders at the Reunion

In chronicling the machinations of Becky, Marygail and Mary Faith to retrieve the affections of Jack, Stephen and Tim, and the various methods by which the men respond, Sayers is a gentle and affectionate satirist of Southern Catholic folkways. The problem with this deft and winsome novel is that few readers have had the benefit of attending Camp Our Lady of Perpetual Help with the leading characters, and will inevitably find themselves feeling like outsiders at the reunion. Less than riveting in themselves, these romantic entanglements need to be placed into context.

The occasional snippets of background supplied by Sayers leave us in the position of spectators, shut out of the small parochial world of the born-and-bred Due Easters. Without its predecessor to fill in the gaps and involve us with parish life, “How I Got Him Back” is only half as engaging as it might be.