(5 of 5)
First novelists sometimes focus their fiction at the wrong screen. That misplaced emphasis is Sara Vogan's only problem when she takes women's liberation to Big Sky country in this amusing, well-tuned novel. Shelly's Leg is a small-town Montana tavern, named for its long-dead founder, a one-legged beauty notorious for excessive dancing and drinking. Now the main patrons are Margaret, a divorced mother of two entering her 30s, and her best friend, Rita, a voluptuous Indian. They vie for the love of Woody, a drifting steel-guitar player who has all the verve of a Silly Putty peace symbol. The feminist polemics are predictable, but around this Mr. Right triangle, Vogan provides a varied and hilarious supporting cast.
Sullivan, the fiftyish, leathery proprietor, oversees the brawls and betrayals with range-war morality. To Shelly's photograph over the jukebox, he recounts their bygone love affair in captivating soliloquies, interrupted by slugs of Scotch and Maalox. He also coaches the bar's women's fastpitch Softball team, including Rita and Margaret, Shirley, a Vegas prostitute who refuses to slide because her customers would not like bruises, and a raucous bench of ranch women and factory hands. Their epic drinking and scatalogical vocabulary on and off the field do more for sexual equality than any diatribes delivered by the central antagonists. When her creations are playing ball instead of bawling (about one-third of the tune), Vogan never fails to connect. And for a rookie, .333 is not bad.
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST by Marcel Proust Random House; three volumes; $75
"For a long time I used to go to bed early." So begins one of the century's most formidable novels. For a long time the beginning was about as far as many readers cared to go. The seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past seemed endless, the characters and recollections of fin de siècle France too complex to unravel. "Maybe next summer," was the standard attitude. The excuse no longer applies. In this new set, the episodes are combined in three volumes, fresh translations and emendations added by Proust Scholar Terence Kilmartin. Even to the casual reader, Remembrance no longer seems a vast undisciplined structure; its architecture is as planned as Paris' and its cast no more arbitrary than the one in life itself.
With the rearrangement of the novel has come a reappraisal of its author. The neurasthenic in the cork-lined room is revealed as a mercilessly acute social observer, the wan dilettante as a tough-minded shaper of modern sensibility, who used nostalgia as a weapon and proved that time itself could be overborne by memory and art. If you can bring only three volumes on vacation—one witty, one profound, one tragic—this is the work to take.