cover image Dreaming Southern

Dreaming Southern

Linda Bruckheimer. Dutton Books, $23.95 (263pp) ISBN 978-0-525-94453-9

This absorbing, amusing but ultimately frustrating first novel is a picaresque, the story of a journey from Kentucky to California in the late '50s and its parallel interior journey, each more impressive for its digressions than as a shaped totality. Lila Mae Wooten sets out in a swamp-green '53 Packard with her four children to meet husband Roy--he's already made the trip to the Coast in three days, riding on NoDoz and black coffee--because the Wootens are in debt, having invested unwisely in a plan to manufacture an unmarketable flyswatter. Lila Mae invests her time unwisely, too, detouring to Alabama to see a sister she hasn't spoken to in years, then to Minnesota to say hello to a high-school friend, then picking up two runaways, a Native American jewelry maker and waitress, and her son, a teen arsonist. Lila has a big heart, but as they say in the South, her tear ducts are too close to her bladder. The tension in TV writer and Mirabella editor Bruckheimer's novel derives from the contrasting points of view of Lila and her daughter, 16-year-old Becky Jean, who is embarrassed when her mother presents a totally different face to strangers on the road. The setting of pre-interstate America with its wigwam-shaped motor courts, cruel roadside zoos and gaudy if dusty souvenir shops is evocative, as is the music the Wootens sing and listen to. After zigzagging across country, the Wootens and their companions end up lost at the scrubby wilderness edge of the Grand Canyon. We then flash forward to the present for an overlong epilogue intended to tie up all the strings and to augment character development. Yet the novel impresses with its sincerity and the charm of a zany road trip with an interesting crew. Agent, Lynn Nesbit. (Jan.)