Book Review : A Modern-Day Coming of Age in Texas

Owning Jolene by Shelby Hearon (Knopf: $17.95; 209 pages)

It’s easy to see why everyone in this refreshingly irreverent novel wants to claim Jolene. Even at the age of 7, when her flighty mother dresses her up as a 4-year-old boy in order to kidnap her from her conventional father, Jolene is not only loving and cooperative, but a quick study for every role her mother invents.

By the time she’s 19, living in a kind of escrow with her Aunt Glenna and Uncle Brogan in San Antonio, Tex., Jolene has had a lifetime of practice at being all things to all people; a stabilizing influence on her mother, a challenge to her father, a surrogate daughter to the aunt and uncle who happily stand in for her own contentious parents. When we meet her, Jolene is tentatively trying out some identities of her own; studying acting at college and making the rounds of gallery openings and other public events in various costumes to see what real life personality might suit her best. Though she tells her own story in crisp prose spiked with wit and earthy Texas imagery, becoming a writer apparently hasn’t yet occurred to her. She’s still gathering adventures.

An Identity Problem

Posing as a poet in peasant blouse and sandals, Jolene drops into a “Texas Execs Thirsty Thursday,” casing the room for a likely looking pickup. The Texas Execs are an alumni group--”the boys in dark silk suits with white shirts; the girls, white suits and dark silk shirts.” Eavesdropping on up-market chatter around her, Jolene hears about T-bills and debentures, mergers and convertible securities, making mental notes for future use. Within minutes, she’s met an agreeable young man named L. W. Dawson, who appeals to her because he seems so solid and stable; qualities missing from Jolene’s peripatetic life. L. W. has a daddy who spends his days devising a perpetual calendar and a mom who actually loves ironing; parents who seem perfection itself to Jolene, who fantasizes herself baking chocolate chip cookies for the whole family.

By the time she discovers that Dawson is not a banker but an actor and aspiring playwright with an identity problem as acute as hers, she has lucked out at another party, meeting the leading San Antonio artist, Henry Wozenkrantz. The attraction is mutual and Jolene loses no time in becoming Wozenkrantz’s model and mistress. Forty-five years old, successful and authoritative, he has her future solved even before he’s heard the story of her life. He completes her sexual education in short order, paints her so spectacularly that she winds up on the cover of Newsweek, and eventually manages to drive romantic visions of cookie baking for the Dawson family quite out of her mind.

She Steals the Show

Initially somewhat confusing because of the rapid time switches from her childhood racketing around the country with her eccentric mother to her present life as Dawson’s girlfriend and Wozenkrantz’s lover, the novel sorts itself out as it proceeds, past and present snapping together as neatly and tightly as Lego blocks. Hearon has assembled a marvelous cast and given them some splendid opportunities to display their special talents.

Uncle Brogan and Aunt Glenna glitter at a motel party given to launch their newest brainstorm, a cellular car phone designed to look exactly like a rife lying on the front seat; just the thing to revitalize the flat car phone market in the Panhandle. Jolene’s mother, whose various masquerades provide some of the funniest scenes, is an entirely original version of a woman who married too soon and chose a unique method of making up for the adventure she missed, and even Jolene’s father, the stuffy advocate of normalcy, proves a new take on a stock type.

The best lines go to Texas itself, satirized during the bleak days of the oil glut as “a fat kid with pimples who can’t get a date for Saturday night. Last year, the year before, he could have had anybody including your head cheerleader. Now he can’t even get a yes from a barking dog.” But diverting as all these characters and incidents are, the book belongs to Jolene, whose coming of age won’t remind you of anyone else’s in the whole overcrowded genre.