The Girl From Charnelle (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Girl From Charnelle Daryl Farmer (bio) K. L. Cook . The Girl From Charnelle. HarperCollins. Anyone who has ever driven beneath a West Texas moon understands the restless passion the landscape inspires. Even the wind is prone to act on impulse. Throw in some beer and a community dance and there is all kinds of potential for explorations into the human heart. It is territory always ripe, in the right hands, for literary achievement. In K. L. Cook's Last Call, winner of the first Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, readers were introduced to the Tate family through a series of related stories that spanned three generations. The stories told of restless searches for love and familial connection amidst tragedy, adventure, and booze-stained nights. In The Girl from Charnelle, Cook's first novel, he narrows this span to a three-year period, 1958-60, and focuses on teenage Laura Tate and her affair with the much older and married John Letig. Laura is a complex and sympathetic character. Torn between youth and maturity, she must deal with her own sexual awakening in secrecy. It is to Cook's credit that he accurately captures the transitional complexity of adolescence without relying on condescending teenage stereotypes. Instead, he captures both her confusion and maturation with intelligence and honesty. [End Page 153] It is in fact not the follies of her youth so much as two restless acts by adults in Laura's life that set the novel in motion. The first is the abandonment of the family by Laura's mother, who one day leaves with a single suitcase and is never heard from again. The second is the seduction by Letig, which begins with a drunken New Year's Eve kiss outside the Armory during a community dance. These events are shown to us early-in the prologue and first chapter. While it is the kiss that begins the torrid affair that carries the narrative, it is the abandonment by Laura's mother that plays constantly as backdrop, always lurking in the shadows to create a psychological depth to both the affair and Tate family dynamics. Like Laura and her family, we can never fully know why Mrs. Tate left, but there are hints that give us insight into the mother's own troubled interior world-the suicide of a cousin; the bizarre incident of the family's dog giving birth to a litter of puppies and then violently rejecting them; a foreboding lightning storm that destroys a tree on the night before she leaves. Regardless of her reasons, the case can be made that Laura's innocence was taken from her not only by her loss of virginity but by the loss of her mother as well. The Girl from Charnelle is, then, a book about loss of innocence. This loss of innocence is indicative not only of the characters but also of adolescence during a time in American history just prior to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and at the beginning of the political career of Richard Nixon. One of the novel's strengths is this evocation of the time period. Political discussions take place among the family about Johnson, Kennedy, and Nixon, but it is best captured through Hollywood references. Laura reads the Hollywood Gazette, and movie-going is an important family activity. Even the animals in the book are given names that resonate as classic Hollywood actresses-Greta, Fay, Ginger, and Hayworth. Cook captures the surreal feel of the old drive-in theater perfectly: Laura's father would clamp the speakers to each side of the truck and turn the volume up high, even though it wasn't necessary, because the sound from the two hundred other speakers in the drive-in could easily be heard. But that was okay with Laura. She loved how strange it seemed, almost dreamlike, hearing the same private conversation being carried on simultaneously all around her while the film flickered on the monstrous, bug-spattered screen. It was both communal and intimate-the smell of hot dogs and popcorn, the collective smacking and munching and swallowing, the stars twinkling overhead like a Hollywood effect. Part of...