Beating the Sophomore Jinx

By Paul Gray

ORIGINAL SINS by Lisa Alther; Knopf; 592 pages; $13.95

After writing a truly successful first novel, most authors feel obliged to try again. The odds are not encouraging. Fledgling novelists tend to pour everything they know or have experienced into their first efforts. Replenishing bare cupboards is never easy, especially when new demands imposed by literary fame are added to the normal burdens of living and working. Then there is the problem of a presold audience, its expectations buoyed by an impressive debut. What, this group itches to know, can the sophomore writer do for an encore?

The critical and commercial acclaim that greeted Kinflicks (1976) subjected Novelist Lisa Alther, 36, to just that question. The answer: She does pretty much the same thing over again, except that she does more of it and better. Kinflicks followed a single heroine from her Tennessee upbringing through a series of wacky encounters up North with the countercultures of the '60s. Original Sins quintuples its predecessor, offering five main characters, all Southerners, who try to grow up in a region and a country that are changing even faster than they are.

Secure in their eastern Tennessee mill town and its surrounding valley, Emily and Sally Prince play childhood games with Raymond and Jed Tatro. They are joined by Donny Tatro, who is not related to the other boys, although their ancestors once owned his; Donny is black. High school and adolescence break the original ties that bound this group together. Donny is firmly segregated elsewhere, while Emily and Raymond turn out to be misfits and loners; she is gawky and plays basketball, while he collects stamps and mopes around in rayon shirts and reindeer sweater vests. Only Sally and Jed thrive in their environment and become small-bore celebrities: the pretty, peppy cheerleader and the swaggering varsity tackle.

With commendable speed and economy, Alther divides these five young people into the three who will leave home and the two who must stay. After much comic fumbling and steamy negotiating, Jed takes Sally's virginity. She responds like any well-brought-up Southern girl in the early '60s: "She clung to his hand, seeking from his fingertips assurance that he still respected her, would protect her reputation, would eventually marry her, and would love her forever. That didn't seem like too much to ask." When her pregnancy finally occurs, Sally and Jed marry and concoct an earlier wedding date that the town's mythology can live with. Her father gives Jed a job in the mill.

Emily, Raymond and Donny I wind up in New York, all seeking freedom from the constraints of the " South and all baffled by the impersonality and rootlessness of the big city. They are easy touches for any groups that offer them companionship and forgiveness for the site of their births: "One of the South's inadequacies, Emily had decided, was to instill in its children the ability to listen politely while people dumped on their homeland." Donny eventually falls in with a black power cadre in Harlem. Raymond and Emily join a group of civil rights activists who dress in "sharecropper disguises." Raymond gets beaten up on a voter-registration drive in, of all places, Tennessee, and later decides that the South's bondage is caused not by racism but by Yankee capitalism. Emily leaves her unemployed radical husband and becomes a lesbian.

As she cuts back and forth between the adventures and peregrinations of her characters, Alther constructs a broad social portrait of nearly two decades of American life. She covers civil rights, Viet Nam, women's lib, the sexual revolution, radical politics and back-to-earth movements. Raised in the comfortable stasis of a small Southern town, Alther's young people are woefully and often hilariously unprepared for what life in the '60s and early '70s throws their way. What is more, the tight little community they grew up in is being rattled into unrecognizability. Outside organizers have installed a union at the cotton mill, which has passed from the hands of the Prince family and is now owned by a distant conglomerate. Even stay-at-home Sally and her lug of a husband are ruffled by newfangled ideas. Sally decides that she wants a career.

Original Sins is an old-fashioned novel in the best sense of the term. It propels singular, interesting characters through a panoramic plot. Alther takes risks that sometimes fail. She is willing to sacrifice plausibility for a comic effect, to put her characters through paces that occasionally seem dictated rather than inevitable. But such lapses are more than offset by the novel's page-turning verve and intelligence. Alther knows that no theory or ideology can account for the cussed complexities of daily life. As Emily, Raymond and the rest stumble from one ism to another, their author both mocks their blindness and applauds their determination to keep searching. She gives generously, both to her readers and to the children of her imagination.

--By Paul Gray

Excerpt

" 'Miss Sally Prince, escorted by Mr. Jed Tatro.'

Sally was wearing a strapless white gown with a full ballerina-length skirt. Atop her dark blond hair was a rhinestone tiara. The carnations she had shamed Jed into sending were tied on her wrist. She was overcome with pride and had to blink back tears. This was the moment each Ingenue had been working for all year. This was the whole glorious reason for the bake sales, the car washes, the raffles. She glanced with a proprietary smile at Jed in his rented white dinner jacket. He wore a ruffled shirt, and a plaid cummerbund and bow tie. Across his chest was the purple sash that identified him as an Ingenue Escort. He was grinning at their friends, who were applauding as she and he descended the steps to Moon River, played by the dance -- band on the stage."

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