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week
of 1/22/03
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Mangham’s
wordcrafting apparent in latest offering By Jeff Minick Who Will Tie Your Shoes? by Mack Mangham. Writers Club Press, 2002. $14.95 — 256 pp.  Watching
writers develop their talent is a little like following the basketball
careers of certain college stars. Some —Virginia’s Ralph
Sampson comes to mind — make all the difference to their university
teams, but become lost or drop from sight when they reach the professional
level. Others continue to shine just as they did in their collegiate
play. Still others seem to rise above their former selves by developing
new talents, achieving stardom by dint of hard daily play on the court.Mack Mangham is a writer who belongs in this last group. Mangham, who divides his time between the North Carolina mountains and the Florida Panhandle, works constantly to develop his talent. He isn’t afraid to try different approaches in literature and to follow different themes, but he also isn’t afraid of honest sentiment or stories with an old-fashioned plot. He is a man who has published books as diverse as The Accidental Agent, The Shadow Of The Hawk, and Things Left Undone. In all of his five books, Mangham takes to the floor and shows us how the pros develop their talents. In his most recent novel, Who Will Tie Your Shoes?, Mangham once again displays his talents as a writer. This book, subtitled “An Absence of Charity,” tells us the story of the cost of love and commitment in this world. It tells us of Roan Varner, a man who makes his living laying gas pipe, a man who lives by the old codes of truth and fairness. Roan meets Kannon, a bewitchingly beautiful girl who casts her spell on Roan. Soon after they are married, their lives begin to unravel, slowly at first as Roan discovers that Kannon has an insatiable desire for the trinkets and baubles of this world, then faster as Kannon becomes possessed by her own lust for anything that she doesn’t own. Other people also heavily influence Roan’s life. Buddy Culver, a drunken philanderer, seeks to steal Kannon away from Roan. Paulette, a woman driven crazy by life, may or may not have the power of voodoo, which she practices incessantly. Nancy, her daughter, has lived in the dark shadows of that craziness since childhood and is in need of protection both from her mother and from other men. Roan is the only character strong enough to bear the foibles and battle the flaws of the others. As we watch him struggling against everything from his wife’s infidelity to the consequences of a tragic accident at work, we realize that we are seeing the sort of man who is often invisible in our society, the man who works with both his hands and his mind, who holds himself and others to high standards, the man who values the meaning of honor and integrity. Mangham shows us the toll of this battle on Roan. When we first meet him, Roan is a young man starting his life full of dreams and plans for the future, a young man whose levelheaded view of the world is very much an American type, particularly in rural areas. Like many men, however, Roan Varner finds himself beset by the troubles of others and by his own sense of justice. A man like Roan, a man who believes firmly in right and wrong, may only bend so much before he begins to break. Roan does put himself out to understand those around him — he is no blue-nosed Puritan — yet his code does not allow him to condone wrongdoing. Besides his ability to create real characters in his books, Mangham has many other talents as a writer. His dialogue is finely tuned, and he knows how to tell a story. He also has a talent for writing well, for choosing just the right words. Here Mangham describes Roan at work on the pipeline:
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