A Harlequin Romance With a Dark Side

About 80% of Barbara Hall’s second novel is a competent but unexceptional romance, with a plot that could have been lifted from a Harlequin: A brainy, beautiful woman from Washington rebels against her rich family’s expectations (marry an investment banker, live in a house featured in Architectural Digest) and falls for a minor-league construction executive from the little town of Fawley, Va. Will love find a way to bridge their disparate worlds? Or will Fawley’s bigotries and violent secrets prove too disruptive?

The other 20%, though, like vodka slipped into fruit punch, skews the perspective, numbs our resistance and stimulates thought. Hall (“A Better Place”) writes explicitly about American class divisions and implicitly about an even greater philosophical rift that for more than a century has produced our culture wars.

Toward the end of “Close to Home,” Lydia Hunt sums up the difference between her “Northern,” rationalistic outlook and the way her husband, Danny Price, and his people see the world in “Gothic terms” familiar to readers of Faulkner: undying obligations, inescapable fatality, family curses, bad blood and saintliness. Lydia “had learned that life was just hard, and he still believed it was tragic.”

At first, as Lydia moves to Fawley, a sleepy place of Civil War-era homes and a reflexive antipathy to anything new or strange, and begins teaching at the high school, we are firmly on her side. She is stylish and articulate, whereas Danny’s kin are a collection of inarticulate grotesques.

His one-legged cousin, Kyle, is destructive to himself and everyone around him. His 30-year-old brother, Rex, is gay but everyone refuses to admit it. The women in the family seem pathologically repressed. And when people in a Southern town warn an outsider, as Lydia’s neighbors warn her, “You haven’t figured out how we live around here,” we know all too well what they mean.

Hanging over the Prices--and seeming to explain Danny’s moodiness and his strange sense of obligation to the no-good Kyle--is the death of Kyle’s father, Pike. Somebody shot Kyle in the foot; Kyle blamed a black man; Pike accosted the first black man he met, who panicked and killed him. The black man and the judge who acquitted him both had to leave town.

Lydia is sure there is more to the story. Kyle’s sister Joyce, badly scarred in a childhood accident, crippled by anxiety and feebly striving for an independence modeled on Lydia’s, may have some of the answers, she thinks. But Joyce, like Danny, seems determined to let the family secrets fester, regardless of the cost.

Then a giant discount store opens in Fawley, threatening its mom-and-pop businesses and, some residents fear, their way of life. Two store employees are slain. The town goes into what Lydia, blase about Washington’s hundreds of murders a year, views as an emotional frenzy--demanding the killers’ blood and sentimentalizing the victims.

It’s at about this point that we begin to question the superiority of Lydia’s outlook to Fawley’s. She has wit and reason on her side, but don’t the locals, in their insistence that events are profoundly meaningful rather than random, somehow have more depth?

She, too, has been living out a fantasy: that her relationship with Danny, for which she has endured her family’s disapproval and her former friends’ scorn, must prove transcendent. She is shocked when he confesses that he doesn’t want to take over the construction firm, as everyone expects; he would rather shed his suit and go back to laying bricks and hammering nails. “If only ordinary things were going to happen to them, did she have the strength to stand it?”

In one sense, Lydia needn’t worry. The murders, and Kyle’s possible involvement in them, are hardly ordinary. But the future of her marriage depends on how she sees them: as hard things, from which she can simply walk away by leaving Danny, or as tragedies, to which she, like her husband, is inextricably bound. This question lends ballast to the other 80% of the book--the knowing comedy of small-town mores, the portraits of limited people with unexpected resources--and makes it more than just a breezy summer read.