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Review by Rosalind Smith
F inch Nobles was four when it happened. Playing make-believe in the house, she toppled a pot of scalding water onto her face and arm, literally scalding herself for life.
Now in her forties, Finch -- the narrator of "A Gracious Plenty," Virginia writer Sheri Reynolds' third novel -- is the caretaker for a small-town cemetery. Among others, this cemetery's residents include a former child beauty queen who ran away from home and shot herself; the town drunk who had a secret life that shocks his survivors; an angry baby determined to squall for eternity; and Finch's own parents.
The cemetery is Finch's home, too. Worn out from children who scream at the sight of her and adults who avert their eyes, the disfigured Finch finds solace among the Dead. She's learned to hear their singing, their conversations, the Dead calling her name. "Being so lonely," she says, "it was only natural for me to track down those sounds."
But Finch can never shut out the town's living inhabitants completely. For one thing, Lucy Armageddon -- as the dead beauty queen prefers to be known -- keeps asking Finch to deliver a message to her grieving mother: tell her her daughter wasn't murdered, as the town believes; she took her own life.
Furthermore, the ladies' Sunday school class wants to adopt Finch as their annual special project. And Leonard Livingston, the local police officer (who had howled about having to sit by Finch when they were both first-graders) keeps arresting her for "harassing" Lucy's mother.
Reynolds' prose moves fluidly between the worlds of the living and the Dead, and her imagery is remarkable: "There is work required of all who pass away. In June, the Dead tunnel earthworms, crack the shells of bird eggs, poke the croaks from frogs. The ones who die children make play of their work, blowing bugs from week to week, aerating fields with their cartwheels. They thump the bees and send them out to pollinate gardenias. . . . "
The most difficult job the Dead have is to unburden themselves of their memories, to tell the stories that "make it bearable to have lived at all." Eventually, Finch is forced to realize that the living, too, have stories to tell, and their revelations help crack the shell of her isolation.
Sheri Reynolds has a unique talent for toeing the line between fantasy and reality, between the familiar and the bizarre. In her best-selling novel "The Rapture of Canaan," the practices of a fundamentalist religious sect teeter between strict and barbaric, leaving the reader and the characters alike to question their perceptions. Truth is similarly elusive in "A Gracious Plenty." I don't know whether Reynolds means us to view Finch's beyond-the-grave relationships as fact or fantasy, but in the end I'm convinced it's all relative. "We put our truths together in pieces," Finch observes, "but you use nails and I use glue. You can look at a scar and see hurt, or you can look at a scar and see healing." "A Gracious Plenty" is a beautiful story about pain, love and redemption from one of the best Southern writers around.
Rosalind Smith is a staff writer at "Birmingham Magazine" in Birmingham, Alabama.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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