cover image Water from the Well

Water from the Well

Myra McLarey. Atlantic Monthly Press, $21 (232pp) ISBN 978-0-87113-610-7

Boston-based writer McLarey proves that you can go home again in this lyrical first novel set in her native southwest Arkansas. Segueing back and forth in time from 1905 to 1972, she uses brief episodes to illuminate the multifarious incidents that form the web of local history: a baseball game between black and white men; a tornado that destroys some homes and lives while capriciously sparing others; a sheriff's passion for a woman with flaming hair; an old black woman's revenge for the rape of her great-granddaughter; a Maine woman who travels to Sugars Spring to make good on her grandfather's Civil War promise. With their often double first names, the welter of characters who people the side-by-side and inextricably intertwined rural communities of Sugars Spring (white) and Bethel (``colored'') are at first as hard to untangle as those in a Russian novel. But the repetitious singsong descriptions help to keep everyone sorted out, as well as give the narrative the incantatory cadence of an oft-recited epic: ``David Ben Sugars, as on so many nights lately, left home shortly after supper, left at the beginning of the pink and lonely time of the evening, left in the new Model A his folks had bought for him. ...'' A fine read for those who enjoy being immersed in a rich torrent of language. (Sept.)