A SCRAMBLING AFTER CIRCUMSTANCES by Margaret-Love...

A SCRAMBLING AFTER CIRCUMSTANCES by Margaret-Love Denman (Penguin: $8.95). Denman’s first novel takes the form of a sustained meditation on life’s unexpected twists and disappointments. After a stroke leaves her partially paralyzed, Eula B. Carpenter is forced to abandon the family farm in rural Mississippi and live in a trailer park with her vacuous daughter, Toy, and her loutish son-in-law, Edward Earl. The aged woman despises this rootless world where plastic plants replace live ones and television takes the place of conversation: “Something’s sucked the living out of trailer parks. No place to put important things.” Alone in her bed, she reviews her life, noting what was genuine and what was feigned. She regrets that her quiet, gentle husband was never able to arouse her passion, as a flashy traveling salesman once did. She recalls her brothers, who left the farm for broader horizons, and the warm relationship she shared with her own mother--a relationship she has been unable to re-create with Toy. Eula B. is not a kindly old lady, but she is an honest one, who judges herself by the same uncompromising standards she applies to others.