The Activist's Daughter

A young woman's gradual commitment to the civil rights movement of the 1960s is the theme of Bache's solid and absorbing third novel (following Festival in Fire Season). Beryl Rosinsky's eventual involvement in the struggle is in ironic contrast to her initial determination to rebel against her mother's activism, spurred when Beryl's father's career was destroyed by the McCarthy hearings. Rejecting all attempts by her liberal Jewish family to interest her in social justice, Beryl believes she's escaped their influence when she enters the University of North Carolina as a freshman. Bache nicely captures the madras and Weejuns conformity of Chapel Hill in 1963. There, inevitably, Beryl witnesses the racism and bigotry that entwine with the gentility and social propriety of the South. Longing to fit in, Beryl nonetheless empathizes with the pain of those who don't. These include her roommates, Ashley Vance and Susan Tillery: the former is a blonde debutante impregnated by a South American diplomat's son and scorned by both families; the latter thinks she may be a lesbian. Beryl's moody first lover, David Lazar, left with a shriveled leg after childhood polio, also is aware that he will always be different. Meanwhile, her family periodically urges her to remain faithful to her religious heritage. Outwardly, Beryl remains resolutely uninvolved until the day she reacts instinctively to an act of plain meanness and finds she's taken the first step toward activism. Bache capably reflects the complexities of this volatile period, including the shock of the Kennedy assassination, and her well-etched characters animate this earnest portrait of a young woman's awakening. (May) FYI: Bache's novel Safe Passage became a 1995 movie.