On Bear Mountain, by Deborah Smith.
New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2001.
$23.95 - 352 pages.

At one point in On Bear Mountain, the narrator, Ursula Powell, who supposedly has operated one of Atlanta’s premier independent bookstores, revisits her old store, where she tells the man whom she loves that “... F. Scott Fitzgerald leaned on this counter when he visited the original owner in 1945 ... I have her picture with him.”

Ursula, who has money problems throughout the book, might have made a mint off that 1945 picture of Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald, you see, died in 1940.

That is just one example of the sort of error, both in tone and content, that mar Deborah Smith’s On Bear Mountain. The overall plot of the book works fine, and will keep readers intrigued and engaged (I read the book too fast, though I am uncertain whether my haste stemmed from interest or from annoyance). Following a troubled childhood in the Georgia mountains, Ursula Powell takes over a bookshop in Atlanta. When she learns that her father has died, Ursula returns home to take care of her autistic brother, their family farm, the artist-tenants who have turned her father’s former chicken coops into apartments, and the statue of a bear which has come to dominate the family as both a talisman and a symbol of their strength.

Meanwhile, the New York artist who sculpted the bear gains great fame after committing suicide, leaving his wife and his son, both of whom suffered greatly to support his art, to reap the money and prestige which result from the sudden upswing of his fortunes. His son, Quentin, goes in search of the bear sculpted by his father, finds it, falls in love with Ursula, and then faces different dilemmas as to what to do both with the bear and his life.

The devil is in the details, as the saying goes, and in this case the book breaks down in the details. Arthur, the autistic kid brother, seems driven into his autism by Ursula and her father, both of whom keep encouraging Arthur to role-play different animals, ranging from bears and dogs to a chicken in an egg. Arthur is a dumbed down Forrest Gump, if you can imagine such a creature; his silly sayings and unbelievable naivete make Dopey of Seven Dwarfs fame look like another Einstein.

Quentin, who grew up in Brooklyn, frequently seems a television caricature, as if the author had created an Italian from watching a few episodes of “The Sopranos.” Quentin’s only spoken Italian is capice; he goes to confession once in the book, apparently to cleanse himself for Ursula, but is soon sleeping with his old girlfriend; he is wounded near the end of the book, shot by a bear cub chewing on a revolver in one of the most unlikely shootings imaginable.

There are other episodes in the story that simply dont add up. It is the 1970s, yet the Powells are supposedly so poor that the family can’t afford a doctor to help with a delivery that ends with the death of the mother and the near death of baby Arthur. Quentin’s mother, Angele, adamantly preaches honor for her son and herself, yet at one point is working for a vicious loan shark. When she is very young, Ursula punches a girl in the mouth who is teasing her, knocking out “... the last of her baby teeth.” Punches between little girls do not knock out teeth, baby or otherwise. On a last visit to his father’s studio, Quentin just happens to find a bundle of his father’s papers; from this pile there slips a letter telling him exactly where to look for the bear sculpture in Georgia. Ursula tells us that when she was a student at Emory University, “... I worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week to buy a tiny old bookstore in an aging Atlanta neighborhood.” If she worked sixteen hours a day, when did she study or attend classes?

Smith also writes at times as if from a dictionary of cliches. Quentin in the Army is “a raw, homesick recruit,” yet he at no time gives any indication of homesickness. Ursula’s mother belonged as a young girl to a sect of snake handlers: “she was bitten by a rattlesnake once, and would have died if my father hadn’t taken her away from her family.” (How did that keep her from dying? Does Smith know anything about snake handlers? No one forces you to take the snake; you are supposed to wait for a call from the Spirit.) Near the end of the book, Mr. John, Ursula’s rich relative, hires four men to destroy the bear statue; he’s caught, but who wouldn’t have guessed that he had done it?

Many of the characters in the book are also cliches, people we’ve encountered in many other books - put-upon mill workers; rich, haughty old-money families; the artists who work for love of their art as opposed to people who work for money. Such cliches do have truth behind them - there are artists who work hard, who suffer, who will live and die in poverty - but even truthful cliches do not always make interesting reading.

The book is better than the last two paragraphs make it sound, rising above its flaws because Smith writes reasonably well. It would have been better still if Smith - and, I might add, her editors at Little, Brown, & Co. - had paid more attention to the details.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars Bookstore on Main Street in Waynesville.)

 

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