I'll Be Home Late Tonight

Echoing Mona Simpson's Anywhere but Here, this first novel takes the mother-daughter road-trip novel into deeper and darker territory--and with rich if troubling results. Sick of her husband's infidelities, June Wolsey grabs her 12-year-old daughter, Lily, hops into their beat-up Buick and spends the next two years careening through the deep South of the late 1950s with only quick stops for drunken (often dangerous or abusive) affairs along the way. Although Lily narrates their adventures, it's her love-hate relationship with June--and its strangely sexual undertones--that takes centerstage. Thames (author of a story collection, As Much As I Know) adds historical weight to this otherwise intimate story by shifting effortlessly from the tension between mother and daughter to the greater racial conflict in the South. The further South they run, the further their relationship disintegrates, until June is all but prostituting Lily: in one disturbingly erotic scene, mother and teenage daughter go on a double date that ends in adjoining rooms at a seedy hotel. What Thames depicts convincingly throughout, in language both vivid and hypnotic, is Lily's confusion of sex with love--especially when it comes to loving her mother. Thames doesn't attempt to resolve these feelings neatly. Instead, through Lily's conflicted narrative voice, a voice thick with bitterness and desire, she reveals Lily's burgeoning sexuality as a force both destructive and empowering, as ambiguous a presence as the cruel, compelling June herself. Bn Discover Great New Writers selection. (Aug.)