My People's Waltz
At first glance, Dale Ray Phillips appears to be cut from the classic Southern storyteller's cloth. That is, he's got a fine colloquial style, an assortment of Dixie-fried settings scattered throughout North Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas, and the sort of heightened, occasionally grotesque approach to character that seems to flourish below the Mason-Dixon line. But Phillips is much too talented a writer to pigeonhole. AndMy People's Waltz, which is billed as a collection of linked stories, is an extraordinary debut.We first meet Richard, the narrator, at age 8. In the wake of his mother's mental illness--which has caused her abrupt disappearance into a sanatorium--the miserable child has fallen into a state of muteness. "Not talking don't make you special," one young relative cautions him. Happily for the reader, though, Richard's silence leaves him no less observant:My grandfather kept his floozy in a silver Airstream above the bend in the river where the dead crossed over. He had finagled Miss Minnie a job as lifetime caretaker of a little patch of no-man's-land and a cemetery just across the Haw River. Whenever a black tenant farmer died, we watched from the trailer's picture window as a slipshod barge fashioned of dye-barrel pontoons and salvaged lumber ferried the coffin and mourners across the river to the grave.By the end of "Why I'm Talking," Richard regains his powers of speech. Yet his other wounds--the kind inflicted by the spectator sport of family life--are slower to heal. He grows up, comes to terms with his parents, and has his own trip through the wringer of love and marriage ("On Friday, Lisa points out that I've been drunk since signing the divorce papers"). What never fails him, or the reader, is the voice that Dale Ray Phillips has honed: eloquent, funny, and invariably forgiving.--William Davies