Two or three times a year, writing these reviews, I feel as if I have just opened a refrigerator to take stock and found several items that will spoil unless eaten immediately. These plastic wrapped plates of food never go together: a pork chop, two hamburgers, some wilting salad, chicken and pea casserole, a kiwi so soft that you know it will go mushy at the first attempt to peel it, grapes that need picking to sort the few good ones from the spoiled ones.

This week I opened my literary refrigerator and found three books that needed reviewing before they also spoiled. I had read all three for the purposes of review, you see, but other books and interests keep pushing these out of the way. It’s time to clean these three away so I can go shopping again and find something fresh.

Sorrell And Son by Warwick Deeping.
Penguin Books, 1926.
Out of print — limited availability.

Sorrell And Son

First onto the table is the oldest of these books, Warwick Deeping’s Sorrell And Son. Originally published in 1926, Deeping’s novel offers the story of an officer and a gentleman who returns from World War I to find himself financially ruined and deserted by his wife. Forced to raise his 11-year-old son, Kit, by himself, Sorrell struggles to find decent employment and a way to provide for his son’s education. Eventually, he lands a job in a new hotel, where by thrift and by the ministrations of a manager who values him for his work and spirit, Sorrell reaches his goal of seeing that his son enters into a professional life.

The well-written tale was interesting for me on at least two counts. First, Deeping gives us a portrait of an England that is ceasing to exist. Immigration, 75 years of class leveling, and a rising sort of Cockney boorishness among the English lend this novel of public schools, tea, uniformed maids, and the proverbial stiff upper lip a sort of quaint, antique reverie in regard to the English soul. Near the end of the book, Kit meets an old derelict who moves along after a brief but pleasant conversation. Seeing Kit’s fiancé approaching, the old man glances back at them:

He turned about for a moment to observe the coming together of the two. English people, his people! By love, some girl too: moved as though corsets — and all tight constraints — were things of the past!

This paragraph illustrates the peculiarities of Deeping’s style — he loved the dash and the exclamation point — as well as his ideas about England and about a time in which “all tight constraints” had been removed. Like many who celebrate the removal of constraints — Kit’s fiancé spends several pages of the book berating marriage before marrying Kit, and Kit, a physician, ends the book by giving his grievously ill father an overdose of morphine without asking the dying man whether he is indeed ready to depart this world — Deeping couldn’t see the future very well, not even the future of England as so blithely predicted in the book. What would he say, I wonder, of England today? Would he still approve those loosened constraints?

Tishomingo Blues by Elmore Leonard.
William Morrow, 2002. $25.95 — 320 pp.

Tishomingo Blues

Elmore Leonard’s Tishomingo Blues offers a whiff of stale air to readers who have read more than two or three of his other novels of the past 15 years. Dennis Lenahan is a high-diver who brings his act to a casino in Tunica, Miss. Here he witnesses a murder, becomes involved with the Southern Mafia, and becomes acquainted with Robert Taylor, a black man from Detroit who has come to Tunica to take over the drug trade from what he dubs the Cornbread Cosa Nostra.

Leonard’s story has the trademarks of the author — the sharp dialogue, the machinations of various characters, a feel for place — yet his depiction of “rednecks,” like the plot itself, is ridiculous. Both Taylor and the boys in the Cornbread Mafia plan to murder one another during a Civil War battlefield reenactment. Why would Taylor go to all the trouble of procuring Civil War uniforms, wheedling his way into the performance, and then persuading Dennis to go along with him to take over the drug operation? If the Mississippians whom he is fighting are such dunderheads, why not just whack them some dark night?

Tishomingo Blues is slower in pace than many of Leonard’s earlier novels, stereotypical in its depictions of race, an insult to southerners, and silly in its conclusion.

The Life Before Her Eyes by Laura Kasischke.
Harcourt, Inc., 2002. $24 — 288 pp.

The Life Before Her Eyes

On the other hand, The Life Before Her Eyes is an intriguing and mysterious novel that has the impact of the movie “The Sixth Sense.” Diana and Maureen, best friends, are talking and preening in the restroom of their high school when suddenly they hear shots, the door bursts open, and one of their classmates carrying a gun gives them a choice: “Which one of you girls should I kill?”

The novel then becomes a meditation, as if we were inside the mind of Diana on a sort of fastforward track, on what answer she will give to this question. We see her past life with Maureen, with her mother and father, with various boys. We also see the future that she will gain or lose with her answer — her husband, her beautiful daughter, her life — and we understand what is at stake not just for her, not just for Maureen, but in many ways for each of us in the daily decisions, large and small, that we make.

Laura Kasischke has written a jewel of a book in The Life Before Her Eyes. She shows us what it is to be a teenage girl in these times better than most writers; she gives us a vivid idea of how the past may intrude in so many ways on our present, and she has created a book that echoes even at the end with mystery. This is one that I plan on rereading someday in the hope that I will better understand both the plot and its meaning. It is a haunting, rich, and beautiful story of love, friendship, and choices.

(Jeff Minick lives Waynesville and can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)