Unearthed Remains, Skeletons in the Closet

SWAN

A Novel

By Frances Mayes

Broadway Books

324 pages, $25

From the land of happily-ever-after comes “Swan,” the first novel from Frances Mayes, travel writer and unofficial poet laureate for all things under the Tuscan sun. Named for a near-perfect Georgia town--that is not all too dissimilar from those villages Mayes has described in her memoirs of Italy--”Swan” opens on the steamy days of summer, the hot “wavy air,” “the throbbing of the cicadas” and the moon angling through the pines.

But something is amiss. An elderly woman discovers an unearthed body in the cemetery, and in a town where everyone knows everyone, it doesn’t take long for the relatives of the late Catherine Mason to hear about her violated grave. Mason’s children, J.J. and Ginger, are more confused than frightened. Their mother’s death, some 20 years ago, is still with them; it was marked a suicide by the sheriff after a brisk once-over investigation. Some people had their doubts, but no one spoke up. Life in Swan went on, more like an episode from “Mayberry, R.F.D.” than from “CSI.”

With their father, Wills, confined to a nursing home and their late mother something of a mystery woman (no clear motive was attached to her death), J.J. and Ginger might well be treated as misfits, but not in Swan. He owns grocery markets and lives like a hermit in a woodsy cabin. She has spent the last couple of years dropping out of grad school, getting a divorce and going to Italy on an archeological dig. Their problems as adults--neither seems able to make life work--don’t include memories of nasty, small-minded neighbors.

For all its charm, Swan does have its share of disturbing, somewhat gothic secrets. Take the Mason clan. J.J. and Ginger’s grandfather, Big Jim Mason, helped build the town, but he was a man whose appetites too easily got in his way. Falling in love with the wife of one of his neighbors and stealing the woman from her husband certainly didn’t help, but then infidelity seems to run in the family. Big Jim’s daughter-in-law, Catherine, had an affair when her husband was away during the war and, not long after, Ginger was born. And then there is the truth about Catherine Mason’s death. A new autopsy proves she was murdered.

Ginger and J.J, intent upon piecing the family history together, look for clues and motives for their mother’s death. Ginger reads Catherine’s wartime diaries. J.J. tracks down her old roommate, as well as a lover, and what begins as a simple premise--children seeking to learn the truth about their family--becomes quickly more convoluted.

Bit players show up at every turn. Surprise confessions are elicited at the slightest prompt. Sudden meetings are arranged with shadowy figures and exposed vendettas drift past like so many dream sequences. The magnolia-drenched air of Swan seems to work like a drug that unfortunately may have clouded Mayes’ vision of her material.

Although the residents of Swan have their troubles, it is impossible to take them too seriously when the best writing in the book is more evocative of place--of grits and hush puppies, clear spring water and woodsy scents, ladies’ bridge games and garden weddings--than character. When everything is sorted out, the tension Mayes had hoped to create evaporates.

Given Mayes’ talent for capturing the local atmosphere, you might finish “Swan” and wonder how her memoir of the Southeast--where she was born--would read. She lives in San Francisco and Italy, but her true-life vision of Georgia might just give Tuscany a run for its money.

In the end, “Swan” reads like a string of happy outcomes in a near-perfect world. But what more should we have expected in a town where residents end their days in the Magnolia Cemetery and the visitor who fatefully found Catherine Mason’s body in the grass was only there to pick the flowers?