Jim dandy

A young hero, and a nation on the brink of war, are lyrically evoked in the old-fashioned Blue Star

(PHIL HULING)

The Blue Star
By Tony Earley
Little, Brown, 286 pp., $23.99

When he published his first novel, "Jim the Boy," about a year in the life of 10-year-old Jim Glass in fictional Aliceville, N.C., Tony Earley told The New York Times that one day he wanted "to see this really fat book that has five or six short stories and a couple of novels and a novella called 'The Complete Jim Glass,' where I do his whole life in as many different ways as possible." Thus far we've seen the Depression-era Jim in the novel that Gail Caldwell, writing in these pages, called "a starkly sweet story. . . . Its arrival on the current American literary landscape is somewhat akin to a rainbow appearing over an industrial park . . . uncluttered, untainted, focused only upon capturing a certain purity of experience." Jim also appeared in the last three stories of Earley's first book, the story collection "Here We Are in Paradise," as an older man, often looking back on his childhood. With his latest book, "The Blue Star," Earley is about halfway through "The Complete Jim Glass," and he has passed the most important test: We're eager for the next installment.

At the heart of "The Blue Star" is a good, old-fashioned love story. It's the eve of World War II, the last days of an innocent, isolationist time. Jim, a high school senior, is smart, popular, and seemingly uncomplicated, except that he has just broken up with the virtuous future valedictorian Norma Harris for reasons he can't quite articulate. His mother is still angry with him for spurning Norma, and she continues to sew the quilt she's set aside for their marriage, a patch of which she has cut from a shirt once belonging to Jim's dead father. "Love is a deeper season than reason," wrote e. e. cummings, and Jim proves a case in point when he turns his attention to a half-Cherokee, half-white classmate who is engaged to a sailor in the Navy, now stationed at Pearl Harbor: "Something warm inflated and rose inside his chest. 'I love Chrissie Steppe,' he said out loud, realizing as he did so that the words were carrying him over some momentous boundary he had never known existed. Jim didn't know in what strange country this unexpected crossing landed him, or what dangers faced him, only that he found the vistas glorious to consider."

Earley writes with the same lyrical simplicity that he employed in "Jim the Boy," calling to mind his literary idol Willa Cather. When his characters swear, they say, "for gosh sakes" or "daggum your fickle hide," and the worst they'd call a person is a "lunkhead." It's the kind of world where Mama has a pot of beans simmering on the stove, and Jim can't wait to wash down his cornbread and pintos with a tall glass of buttermilk. On the surface Earley's prose seems limpid and plain, but out of his precise observations emerge moments of wonder and enchantment, the sweep of fable. He is not afraid of techniques that to postmodern readers might appear quaint, such as personification, because in the eyes of his romantic hero the Appalachian landscape is truly alive. Jim names his rumble-seat coupe "the Major," without a hint of irony, and the car almost seems to guide him up Lynn's Mountain, where Chrissie lives with her impoverished mother and grandparents on the property of her fiancé's family, the Bucklaws.

As it turns out, these future in-laws are anything but benevolent. For all intents and purposes they're holding Chrissie hostage while they wait for their son, Bucky, to return from the Pacific. Chrissie's grandfather has lost his arm and can no longer work, and her father, known in town as Injun Joe, is on the run from the law and hasn't been home in years. So Chrissie is stuck on a vast apple orchard, patrolled by vicious Gestapo-like German shepherds, and forced to serve the Bucklaws' whims. Jim tries to woo her, and though Chrissie says, "I think we at least ought to be able to love whoever we want to, even if it's not a good idea," her family's livelihood is at stake so she has no choice but to rebuff him. When her fiancé returns, then her father, both under terrible circumstances, she and Jim find their fates all the more star-crossed.

In many ways the book's end only marks a new beginning. Over the course of the novel the events of the world have encroached moment by moment upon Aliceville. Bucky has shipped out; Pearl Harbor has come and gone; the cotton mill where Jim's best friend works is making "miles and miles" of khaki twill for the war effort; draft cards have begun to arrive; and patriotic boys like Jim are deciding whether to sign up. But the open-endedness of this novel isn't disappointing, adding instead suspense and resonance.

Reading Tony Earley is like riding along on a winding mountain road and wondering at how he manages to steer clear of the ruts and gaps. He avoids the insularity and easy eccentricities of Southern regionalism, the retrograde yearning for a bygone era, the predictable arc of growth of the standard coming-of-age. In "The Complete Jim Glass" everything old is made new. Timelessness means we hope the story never ends.

Porter Shreve's third novel, "When the White House Was Ours," is due out in September.