The Patron Saint of Red Chevys

Rating:
Summary: Ride Out This Tornado
Review: Murder and touches of Faulkner-Welty Southern Gothic intrigue haunt the pages of Kay Sloan's long-awaited second novel. In The Patron Saint of Red Chevys the author of Worry Beads (1991) has upped the horsepower of her plot, which careens along like an unstoppable vintage pickup truck. Then, too, Sloan's characters in this taut new book -- especially the narrator, Jubilee Starling, whose very name is wonderfully suggestive (and whose given name pays homage to Sloan's fellow Mississippian Margaret Walker's celebrated novel) -- are drawn with more complexity and finesse than ever. Sloan's unerring yet offbeat depiction of the Magnolia State during the segregated 60s; her rendition of blues songs and jazzy trumpet solos belted out in Biloxi and Berkeley, CA; her sentences which are terrifically vivid and arresting, right from the start, "I'm going to kill you" -- all this, for me, plus innumerable other goodies have made The Patron Saint of Red Chevys a coming-of-age page-turner worth waiting for.

Rating:
Summary: Coming of age in the 1960s South
Review: The title of this fine first novel quotes the young narrator's warm, flamboyant mother, referring to the bouncy hula girl on the dashboard of her vintage red Chevy pick-up truck. Bernice Starling dies in that truck, stabbed to death early one morning in 1963 in her own driveway in Biloxi, Mississippi, while her daughter is inside putting on mascara and her father is urging her to hurry or she'll be late for school.

Jubilee Starling, motherless at 13, has vehement loyalties. The police, of course, suspect her father. Even her older sister, Charlene, wonders if he did it. But Jubilee, who knows her father had reason to be jealous, never wavers.

Bernice was a colorful, vibrant woman with a rich, soulful singing voice. Her love of music had taken her deeper into the black community than most Mississippians approved and, in those turbulent times, Bernice was quick to speak her mind. She'd been called an "agitator" and in Biloxi in 1963, you could hardly be called anything worse.

Things do get worse, though, when another death is connected to Bernice's murder. Levi Litvak, the Jewish TV weatherman from Up North wrapped his sporty convertible around a tree shortly after Bernice was killed. It's only a coincidence until his secretary, Loretta Holliday (soprano at the Catholic church, singing student of Bernice's and abused wife) finds a letter in his desk, proclaiming his love for Bernice and swearing if he couldn't have her, nobody could.

"Imagining ways to find the killer couldn't save me anymore," mourns Jubilee, who knows the story of an affair is true. When the police release her mother's 1948 truck, she begs her father to let her have it. While other people, including her sister, find it morbid, even ghoulish to drive that truck, Jubilee makes it her own while keeping her mother with her. The truck is her freedom and her link to the past. Jubilee is always asking herself what Mama would say, what Mama would think.

The sisters have very different ways of coping with grief and the fact of motherless ness. Jubilee has inherited her mother's musical talent and in addition to the standout voice she plays a mean, bluesy trumpet. Music keeps her company in her solitary rambles. Charlene dislikes the noisy trumpet, and as Jubilee turns off the narrow path of their segregationist church, Charlene clings to it, looking for love. The church provides the social structure and public face she needs and she grows increasingly impatient with Jubilee's anti-social tendencies. Jubilee works at keeping her mother's spirit alive, always asking herself what mama would think or say or do.

Yet it's Charlene who flat-out resents Marilyn, the young stepmother who enters their lives four years later. " `Why don't you wait a couple of weeks, till the anniversary of Mama's death?'" she snaps at her father when he makes his announcement. But the girls are growing up, and their sad, sensitive father is lonely. Marilyn is timid, conventional, and not too bright. But she tries hard, and she needs him.

The sisters are on the brink of adulthood as the turbulent 60s explode in anti-war protests and the killings of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Jubilee's killing remains a subject of gossip as well as family grief. There are rumors that Levi Litvak never died and Jubilee still keeps a woman's scarf she found in the garage.

Charlene turns her back on all that `60s upheaval, preferring her personal brand of anger and hope. Jubilee gets a scholarship to Berkeley, much to everyone's dismay. From her father to her boyfriend, everyone is sure she'll be ruined for Biloxi. And Jubilee hopes they're right. But, certain she will find the acceptance she longs for in the urban expansiveness of Berkeley, she is dismayed to discover a different version of the same mean-spirited small-mindedness she left behind. Along with just the sort of education her friends and family feared. And a new story to go with her mother's death.

Sloan captures the unattractive smugness of 60s radicals as precisely as she does the acid in the sugar of the Deep South, a place where the announcement of President Kennedy's assassination brings cheers in school. Jubilee's beguiling voice is yearning, and a little lost. She has flashes of anger and sass, but mostly she takes everything in, weighing it all against her mother's voice.

Sloan's prose is deceptively simple, drawing subtleties and complex emotions from Jubilee's straightforward accounts of events in her life - inadvertently attending the fair on Colored night, playing a dangerous prank on Halloween, overheard gossip in the Piggly Wiggly, first love, second love. Sloan's portrayal of the South seethes. Like many Southern writers she has a love-hate relationship with the place and there's a mournful feel to the racial hatred that pervades the story, and a melancholy to the soft nights and whispered confidences.

This is a debut with the emotional charge and atmospheric richness particular to Southern writers. Sloan has struck all the right notes in her portrayal of coming of age motherless in the turbulence of Mississippi in the 60s.

Rating:
Summary: A Beat Up Old Chevy and Jefferson's Airplane
Review: This is a marvelous second novel, by the author of Worry Beads (1991). Set in Biloxi, Mississipi, during the early 1960s, when the Beatles were building their American audience and Elvis was beginning to step aside, Kay Sloan's Patron Saint is a novel that follows the coming of age of the novel's young protagonist and narrator, Jubilee Starling. Out of the horrific circumstances of her mother's murder, Jubilee negotiates a crew of characters, including her family, who seem to have walked right out of the red dust and swamps of the delta. Along the way she learns about the Klan, young love, anti-semitism, and madness, and catches the powerful fever of moving out and away from there that marks so much of great American literature. Yet for all that she leaves behind, she takes with her that beat up old red chevy and the legacy of the old south that hangs on like a recurrent dream. When she winds up on the West coast, at college, she becomes something of the "real thing," for suburban California wannabees who have heard about Mississipi blues but never lived it like Jubilee has. This is a novel drenched in music, with a fresh take on the rock and roll that once made the period seem new, at every turn a surprise that could change everything-prejudice, bigotry, envy and despair. And that's what makes this novel so fun and great, the imagination that insists, that well, it could be different - everything.