cover image Getting to the Point

Getting to the Point

Teresa Stores. Naiad Press, $10.95 (238pp) ISBN 978-1-56280-100-7

What's the point? Whatever it is, Stores's first novel doesn't make it. Dix, a lesbian in flight from her family, returns to her hometown, Point Will, Ga. as her grandmother nears death. Her lover, Sarah, joins her unexpectedly, shaking up the family's patterns and forcing them to acknowledge her relationship with Dix. Unfortunately, while Sarah is intended to be a sympathetic character, her intentions and actions are intrusive, disruptive and destructive. As family members endure one implausible life-threatening event after another, Sarah spouts advice more suited to self-help manuals than to dialogue. But Sarah is not the only ill-drawn character: the entire family falls victim to Stores's broadly stereotypical rendering of characters and their interior monologues, executed in hokey dialect. None of them is particularly sympathetic, perhaps because what interiority they have is as labored and overemphasized as the repetitive pun made of ``the point.'' Nonetheless, there are some moving moments, suggesting that Stores has the potential to write a novel that interweaves structure and narrative. This is not that novel. (Apr.)