By GREG JOHNSON
For the Journal-Constitution
Published on: 04/01/04
In her essay "Place in Fiction," Eudora Welty remarked, "Place is one of the lesser angels that watch over the racing hand of fiction, perhaps the one that gazes benignly enough from off to one side, while others, like character, plot, symbolic meaning, and so on, are doing a good deal of wing-beating about her chair."
The setting of a novel, Welty argues, provides its essential vitality: "The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place."
Few contemporary writers understand this truth as well as Anne Rivers Siddons, a former Atlanta resident now living in Charleston, S.C., whose recent fiction has been steeped in the atmosphere of Carolina's Lowcountry. Charleston and its environs provide the rich, lushly evoked setting for her 15th novel, "Islands," whose characters seem as attached, if not more so, to their surroundings as to each other.
Siddons' appealing protagonist is Anny Butler, who operates a social services agency that helps disadvantaged children. She seems content with her solitary but professionally rewarding life until she meets Dr. Lewis Aiken, a pediatrician with a blue-blooded Charleston pedigree. After marrying him, Anny is introduced to his circle of old-Charleston friends, nicknamed "the Scrubs," who share a beloved beach house and connections to the medical profession. More important, they share a love of the islands — Edisto and Sullivan's — where they spend much of their free time and enjoy the comforts of their affluent, middle-aged lives.
Until the last third of the novel, fairly little actually happens; "Islands" is somewhat short on plot. Yet Siddons compensates for this with her amply detailed evocation of these Southern aristocrats' privileged and land-bound lives, and, as always, she writes beautifully. The novel is replete with passages like the one describing "those muted bronze days of September, when the monarch butterflies came drifting in from the north and settled in shivering clumps on the trees and shrubs, and the great autumn writing spiders wove their fables in the early mornings."
Another typical passage describes Camilla, the most graceful and enigmatic of the Scrubs:
"By now the osteoporosis had bowed her considerably, and there were streaks of silver in the thick chestnut hair. But her medieval face was unlined, and her brown eyes still glowed in their hedge of lashes. She still wore her hair tied back at the nape of her neck, and sometimes still let it blow free. She was still slender, still fine boned, still as serene as a white candle."
In its last hundred pages, the novel takes on new life with the addition of a colorful character named Gaynelle Toomer, a lively Southern "good old girl" with enormous breasts and a fondness for motorcycles. The mother of young Britney, a veteran of children's beauty pageants, Gaynelle is hired to do odd jobs for Anny and her friends, and especially to care for the ailing Camilla. Her vibrancy and generosity bring a needed shot in the arm to "Islands" and casts into relief the other characters' subtle snobbishness and sense of entitlement.
As the action proceeds, there are several deaths, and an elegiac tone is palpable in the closing chapters. A surprising twist near the end helps compensate for the longueurs of the earlier chapters.
Siddons' title refers not just to Edisto and Sullivan's but also to the ultimate isolation of the characters in their loneliness and loss. Yet the vitality of her prose, like the humanity of her characters, seldom falters, making "Islands" one of her best novels to date. Interesting as her people are, and as much as they may suffer, it is ultimately their rootedness in their beloved Lowcountry that sets them apart and that provides, in the end, a sort of redemption.
Greg Johnson's most recent book is a collection of stories, "Last Encounter With the Enemy." He teaches in the graduate writing program at Kennesaw State University.
