The Last Hotel for Women

Her unusual ability to depict Southerners with discerning candor as well as sympathetic understanding has distinguished Covington's three previous, praised novels (Gathering Home, et al.). Here, her touch is not as sure, as her story centers on the events in Birmingham, Ala., in 1961, when CORE activists were attacked by Klansmen with the active connivance of the city's commissioner of public safety, the notorious (real life) Bull Connor. Here Connor is depicted as a longtime friend of hotel-keeper Dinah Fraley, her husband Pete and their two children, sensitive Gracie, 12, and high-school senior Benny. The family hotel was once a bordello run by Dinah's mother, and Connor's love for the beautiful (now dead) madam is still the central event in his life. Covington follows the Fraley family through a time of personal and community crisis and indicates that the hope of racial healing in the South resides in good people like them. She succeeds in conveying the complex, relatively respectful relationship between blacks and guilt-ridden whites in Birmingham until Connor whips the community into a frenzy. But in trying to map the psychological contours of a racist like Bull Connor, Covington creates a character with no real dimensions. Her Connor is a pathetic figure, eccentrically obnoxious but never real to the reader. Covington truly stumbles, however, in depicting Pete Fraley's awkward and improbable relationship with a deliberately mute black worker in the foundry where he is foreman. The pervasive premonitory tone is not only overstated (convincing drama never occurs) but also inhibits the narrative, creating lethargy rather than suspense. Author tour. (Feb.)