Death in Equality

The literary allusions and ambitions of the narrating protagonist blunt the effect of some very lyrical prose here, rendering Ebersole's first novel so much gilded decoration in search of a viable core. Cordelia is a young, unpublished New York writer with lung cancer who, following a family tradition, returns to her small Alabama hometown to die. Six generations of Cordelias have lived or died already in Equality, Ala., where the traveling carnival is the biggest event ""since the chicken truck ran the stoplight and turned over in front of the Shiloh Baptist Church."" But death is the real show in this town, and Ebersole chronicles one bizarre demise after another with unrestrained zeal. Unfortunately, each character she introduces is a Southern small-town stereotype, including spinster sisters who live together in a dilapidated old house; a lonely Chinaman whom nobody trusts; a fervent preacher who pretends to cure the incurable; and white-trash teenagers who have a baby out of wedlock. Although Cordelia insists that all she has ""is a history,"" many of her ""memories"" are simply stories she has heard secondhand, and none serve to illuminate who she is, why she left Equality for New York or why she has returned. As Cordelia moves closer to death, and unconsciousness, an ""omniscient narrator"" (her id, we are told) takes over the storytelling. Ultimately, the lyricism is too studied, and a glut of literary references (particularly to Truman Capote and Harper Lee)-as if a catalogue of what a mind has read could substitute for what a heart has felt-fails to breathe life into Cordelia's dying. (Mar.)