BOOK REVIEW : First Novel Captures Many ‘Voices’

Voices From Home by Neil Caudle (Putnam: $19.95; 304 pages.)

There really isn’t anything more wonderful in the world than opening a book you’ve never heard of by a first novelist whose name you don’t know and beginning to read with no expectations at all, then being jerked up one side and down the other as if Malcolm X himself was teaching you the Lindy Hop, or the Virgin Mary was leaning out of a cloud to haul you up to heaven on an unexpected weekend jaunt. “Voices From Home” is absolutely wonderful, and Neil Caudle is absolutely amazing.

Caudle’s got first-novel-fever, for one thing. He’s tried to pack this book with as many ideas as a squirrel has nuts in the ground in case a truck runs him over before he gets to write a second book. Caudle takes as his material not just the Changing South, but he makes his narrator a 15/16-year-old girl and never falters for one word in his language or tone. (Caudle actually could be a 16-year-old girl, for all I know, and that bearded man on the jacket an impostor.)

But what about the nature of art, Caudle also wonders, of being existentially engage ? The importance of finding your own cosmically perfect spot in the universe? What about the individual’s relationship to his or her parents? How can a person claim his or her familial legacy and still be free? And--just in case Caudle should get struck by lightning before he gets around to his second novel--how can children cope with the nightmares of childhood, divorce, adult persecution, and finally, one of those domestic crimes that should seal anyone’s fate forever? Last but not least, God knows, what is the role of suffering in the life of an artist--or, turning the question on its head, is it at least possible to transmute suffering, not just the lead of daily life, but the deadly toxic chemicals of terrible injustice and fear and brutality and sadness into the gold that goes beyond gold, the real stuff: High Art ?

Well, sure!, Caudle says, as he rides this bronco of a book that sometimes almost gets out of control but never does. Libby Lampert is only 15 when her beautiful, charming, cool-dude dad takes up with another woman and Libby’s mother, cutting her own losses, kicks him out. Libby and her brother, Buddy, freak. Part of the problem may be the Southern town they live in, small and claustrophobic, where blacks and “white trash” live on one side of a creek, and the aspiring middle class lives on School Hill. Libby’s mother came from “better.” Her dad, who used to be a baseball player, came from the wrong side of the creek. He has made it to the “right” side, but his “instincts” bring him down. He lives with his new girl in a squalid trailer. She drinks; he brandishes his guns.

Libby’s mother takes the safe road. She finds an unglamorous house painter, moves to Chicago and takes her senile, dementia-case mother with her. Libby and Buddy choose to stay in town, battling the agony that telegraphs every minute of the day: They’re not wanted. What does “society” do to these kids? Society brands them as juvenile delinquents, of course, and some of the scenes with a cruel social worker are spookily Dickensian. How do you live when your whole life is falling apart? What can you do from minute to minute to keep from going crazy? Libby tries drugs, sex, and the consolations of a best girlfriend. But her lover and her best friend are black, and in this town, love and/or friendship with blacks is a crime far worse than murder.

Nonetheless, those who are going to survive do survive. This ascension above existential agony is probably the greatest miracle of any life. Libby repudiates her mother, then gets her back. Libby adores her father, then frees herself from him, gets humiliated, and jerked around, and preached to, and betrayed, and bullied, but at every instant, life itself is going on--almost too precious to put into words. Libby stands with her brother by a car drinking cold beer. She shares one cigarette with her dad. She allows her 5-year-old cousin to adore her from afar. She tells whopping, monstrous lies that are an art form in themselves. And finally, in an ending that’s been present in clue after clue, she extricates herself from the past enough to make art out of all of her terrible experiences.

If Pete Dexter’s “Paris Trout” (an amazing work) danced in a sock hop with Gavin Lambert’s “Inside Daisy Clover,” the result might be “Voices From Home.” In real life, Pete Dexter and Gavin Lambert would probably never even speak to each other, but still, this electric, literary liaison has happened. What a kick! What a marvelous, beautiful surprise!