Quite a Year for Plums
Random House Audiobooks, $25
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REVIEW BY ROSALIND S. FOURNIER
The first novel by popular essayist Bailey White, Quite a Year for Plums offers an intimate, gossipy, and occasionally irreverent glimpse into the friendship of a group of eccentrics in a smalo town in southern Georgia. Like a script, the book begins with a List of Characters, which is helpful for the first few chapters, as White tosses characters around as though you've known them all your life: There's Roger, the plant pathologist "specializing in foliar diseases of peanut"; Ethel, Roger's flirtatious ex-wife; Ethel's aunt, Eula, and her post-middle-age friends who share a motherly adoration for Roger; and a dozen quirky others. More than a novel, Quite a Year for Plums is a series of intertwining short stories, each chapter strong enough to stand alone. For instance, chapters about Della ("a wildlife artist visiting the area to study and paint local birds") -- an outsider who upsets the status quo by unwittingly seducing the beloved Roger -- are true gems. White's characters in Quite a Year for Plums are sophisticated students of horticulture and agriculture. To that end, there are priceless collisions between ruralists and weekend wannabes. When Eula's sister, Louise, becomes increasingly preoccupied with hopes of attracting aliens through secret numerical codes, she's thought to be too crazy to live alone, so Eula moves Louise in with her and arranges to have Louise's home rented out for the spring. A couple from Kansas rent the home for an extended country vacation, but what begins as a romantic getaway ends in divorce as the husband reveals his passion for piecing together letters and numbers from discarded road signs. Louise finds kinship with him and moves happily back into her own home with him, begging the question, what is crazy, if it all works out? As in White's acclaimed essay collections, Mama Makes up Her Mind and Sleeping at the Starlite Motel, she demonstrates here that the lives of small-town dwellers are easily as intriguing as those of their big-city counterparts -- if you take the time to look, and, clearly, White's years of observation are the secret behind her capable prose. Rosalind S. Fournier is a staff writer for Birmingham magazine in Birmingham, Alabama.
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