PEACHTREE ROAD
Anne R. Siddons
New York: Harper and Row, 1988
566 pp., $18.95
When this novel arrived, I looked, never having heard of its author, for external clues as to what kind of novel it was. The jacket describes it as "a powerful love story set against the turbulent history of Atlanta over the past four decades" and boasts of a 50,000-copy first printing and a $55,000 national marketing campaign. So far, all the signs point to a commercial product—not a serious novel but rather a serious business, seeking to capitalize perhaps on everything from the afterglow of Gone with the Wind to the current interest in Atlanta as the site of the Democratic convention.
On the other hand, a poem by James Dickey is quoted as the book's epigraph, and Pat Conroy features prominently in the acknowledgements; both these sometime Atlantans are, though occasionally best sellers, certainly serious writers. It is promising, too, that an attempt is made promptly to exorcise the ghost of Margaret Mitchell. In the opening scene the narrator is describing Oakland Cemetery:
"Lucy always swore that it was here that she and Red Chastain first made love, on top of Margaret Mitchell's grave, on a spring night after a Phi Chi dance when she was sixteen. 'I swear the earth moved, Gibby,' she said. 'Old Red thought it was his incomparable [f— — —] but I'm sure it was little old Peggy Mitchell applauding.' "
This writer's aspirations go beyond the merely commercial.
Perhaps I should explain that I don't mean to draw a sharp line between the popular or mass-audience novel, whose aim is entertainment, and the serious or art novel, whose aim is to embody fresh perceptions and insights, a new vision of life. Most novels are mixed, and only an intellectual snob would want to separate the two kinds completely. Still, there is a broad distinction—very obvious in the extremes of both kinds—that seems worth making.
Turning to Peachtree Road itself, the first observation to make is that it should be a huge success commercially. Siddons, who has written four earlier novels, is a good storyteller and a conscientious craftsman. She knows the recent social, political, and economic history of Atlanta like the back of her hand, realistically and from the inside, and she can bring it alive. The novel is well and intricately plotted, full of lively incident and drama, with suspense maintained to the very end.
Shep and Lucy
Peachtree Road is told in the first person by Shepard Gibbs Bondurant III, the last of the Bondurants ("Or am I?" he asks immediately, hinting at one of the novel's mysteries). He is an attractive, if somewhat garrulous and repetitive, narrator, and the chief subject of his story is his first cousin Lucy and his relation to her. The structure of the novel is simple but effective: in the prologue, Shep describes, immediately after the burial, Lucy's funeral and his own agitated feelings about it. With chapter one he goes back to his first meeting with her in 1940, when he was seven and she was five, and the rest of the novel proceeds chronologically in one long retrospect or flashback until the last chapter, 550
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